Contact problem

Taking a backup of your contacts is a pain.
Its even more painful when, you have to move from one cellphone to another, and if they are of different vendors, you start feeling that typing everything again is probably better than battling with the backups and syncing.
Nokia screwed their customers even further, when they released the latest OVI suites.
Until before, you could have taken a backup of your contacts in either a CSV(comma seperated values) or VCF(visiting card vCard) format.

Most of the people who face these problems are the ones, who try to move from old feature phones to smartphones. There is absolutely no backward compatibility.
And copying the contacts to SIM card is a bad idea, as multiple details of a single contact are gone once you move it to the SIM card.

One more problem is, if you keep changing your phones wpte often. In that case, even manual syncing become a tedious and boring process.
Hence, the best way to do this would be, to backup your contacts into the cloud.
If its in the cloud, no matter which new device you are using, or even multiple devices, all the contacts will be synced across.
In this way, every smartphone out there automatically gives you cloud syncing, or atleast an easy way to sync the contacts manually.
No, you do not have to pay a cloud service provider to do any such things.
Incidentally, a service which we use almost everyday will suffice for this.

GMAIL.
Its the best free cloud service out there and its been there from ages.

Steps to backup contacts to the cloud :
1) Depending on which model your old phone is, if its something that’s supported by the vendor’s, PC suite, then your in luck. Else you will have to manually move the contacts through SIM, sacrificing a few details.
2) Using the PC suite given by your vendor, take a backup of your contacts in any format. Nokia(because of their sad OVI suites, gives you a backup in .nbu format).
Samsung, Sony etc gives you an option to either export it in .csv or .vCard format.
3) If its a Nokia phone, you can get this open source software NBU Explorer to browser through the .nbu files and export a csv or .vCard files out of it.
4) Preferably .vCard files are easier to handle.
5) Once you have the .vCard files, you will need to get a consolidated vCard file having all your contacts, in a single file.

To do this,
In Windows : Navigate from the command prompt,(Start > Run > cmd) to the folder where all the .vCard(.vcf) files are. Then type this command ” copy /b *.vcf allinone.vcf ”
In Mac(Unix systems) : command ” cat *.vcf >> allinone.vcf ”
Once this is done, you get a single vcf file with all your contacts in it. However there could be an issue in the file. The contacts are not seperated by a new line. To do this, all you need is to open this file in any text editor, search for END:VCARD and replace it with END:VCARD nn where n is new line feed.
This should separate the contacts properly with 2 new lines.

Once you have the properly formatted file, you can import this into your Gmail contacts. Its a piece of cake.
However for 1st timers I would suggest to import this into a new Gmail id, rather than the existing one, so that it wont conflict with the existing contacts. Once done properly, you can merge it to the existing account itself.

For most of the people this should suffice. Gmail is integrated with probably every smartphone out there.
However if you’re an iDevice(iPhone, iPod touch, iPad) user or even a Mac user, you can go one more step ahead to make things even simpler.
Once contacts are imported to Gmail, export it again to another file from Gmail.
This is done, for some reason that Apple allows only Gmail formatted vcf file.
Once this is exported, login to your iCloud account directly on the web.
Open the contacts app, then drag and drop this vcf file there.
Voila!
All your contacts are there, and it will sync to all your iDevices automatically, if its configured with the same Apple ID, seamlessly.