Import your Nokia S40 Contacts to Google or the like

Nokia S40 phones’ can’t sync with Google or any other good online web services. So if you wanted to export your contacts from your phone and import them into your GMail contacts/other contact management, how would you accomplish this?

It’s a little complicated, but easy once you do it for the first time.

From your Nokia S40 phone:
Take a backup of only your contacts, and transfer this backup file to your computer, running GNU/Linux(if anyone can replicate this process on Windows, drop a comment).

On your desktop:
The NBF file is a simple zipped file. Unzip this zip file, and navigate your way to the contacts folder:

$ unzip Backup000.NBF
$ cd predefhiddenfolder/backup/WIP/32/contacts/

If the above specified path does not exist, then look for the directory contacts in the extracted directory.
The contacts are stored in the most popular vcard format, all the contacts you have are in a separate vcard for each contact. Let’s combine all of these into one single vcard file:

$ cat *.vcf > ~/Desktop/phone-contacts.vcf

Now you can import this file into any contact management application that supports the vcard format.

For GMail:
Navigate to Contacts(it’s located a the top left corner), then under More actions, click on Import. Choose the newly created combined vcard file(located on your desktop) and click on Import.

To clean up things, in the Contacts view in GMail, again select More actions, and click on Find & merge duplicates…, this will ensure that you don’t have duplicate contacts, and clean up your contacts as well.

If someone accomplishes this in Windows, please leave a comment on doing so.

liferea and gmail

I bet that mail client of yours just lies there doing nothing, when its sole purpose is to inform you the minute you get a new e-mail. Well, that client just takes up more memory, to just do that, doesn’t it? What if you could just check new mail via an RSS feed?

liferea to the rescue! It’s a simple, easy, and powerful RSS client, which can manage many feeds and provides notification via libnotify. Setting up gmail as a new feed is very easy. Follow your distribution specific install guide here.
Launch liferea from the menu, and click on “New Subscription”. The Feed Source for gmail’s RSS feed to your inbox is https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom. Click on OK, then a little while later, it will ask for your login credentials.

Username: example
Password: ******

Do not include @gmail.com. And your all set to receive mail updates. Look in the Tools -> Preferences to tune liferea.
You can also add your facebook notifications feed as well.