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How to Transfer Contacts from a Nokia S40 Phone to Android

Recently I was faced with a rather tough task of migrating a loved one from the quickly fading world of Nokia to that of Android. Now this is ideally a quick painless transition for most young people and tech savvy folks but for most average users this is the beginning of an educational journey, one that may be quite frustrating if no one is around to help.

This is even more frustrating if the person undergoing the transition is coming from a rudimentary operating system such as Nokia S40 and the similar countless variants that exist out there. For those that I may have lost there, just know Nokia S40 are those Nokia phones with keypads that get the job done and have a long battery life.

Anyway, the following is how I imported contacts from one of this phones to an Android smartphone. Strange enough I “discovered” this method by error after a lot of frustration. The Nokia in question here is the C1-01 model, but this should ideally work with any Nokia S40 phone that can connect with the Nokia PC Suite.

Export Nokia S40 Contacts to VCF

nokias40
Example of a Nokia S40 Handset

1. Download and Install Nokia PC Suite in a windows computer but make sure the phone is compatible. If it has Bluetooth and/or USB connectivity that’s a good sign.

The version am using is quite old [Nokia PC Suite 7.1.60.0, English], so if the newer versions happens not to work, which I highly doubt (backward compatibility), you can get the installer for this version and other older versions from here. If the phone release date is quite recent, it’s probably a good idea just stick to the newer versions.

2. Launch the PC Suite and connect the phone to the PC Suite using Bluetooth or USB cable if it’s
available. If the phone has both options, USB connectivity is more reliable.

3. Once a connection is established it will look as the screenshot below. Now open the Contacts option.

pcsuite
Open Contacts

4. In the contacts window, the suite will sync with the phone and load contacts.

contacts
Contacts Loaded

5. If you’re interested with all the contacts, scroll and select all the contacts or use the shortcut Ctrl+A. If not just, select the contacts that you need to export.

6. Right-click on the selection and select Send Business Card

export
Export Contacts

7. That will present you with an Email Message Editor which we’ll just ignore for now but Do Not close it just yet. Just minimize it, along with the PC Suite.

editor
Message Editor

8. Go to your desktop and navigate to your Temp folder. This is located under the following address in Windows Vista and above:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Temp
where username is the user name for your Window’s account and C: is the Windows partition.

Alternatively just type %temp% on the address bar and press Enter or open the run option (Win Key + r) and type %temp% and press Enter.

9. In the Temp folder you’ll notice a bunch of *.VCF files with the name of the contacts we had selected for sending as business cards.

10. Select the vcf’s and copy them to a safe location. I recommend you copy them to a folder in the desktop [e.g contacts] if you’ve trouble using command prompt. It’s now Ok to exit the PC Suite.

11. Once you’ve copied them to a safe folder, open the command prompt. Do this by searching cmd in the start menu or open the run option (by Win Key + r) type cmd and press Enter.

12. In the command prompt, navigate to the folder where you copied the vcf’s. For example, for the folder contacts in the desktop just run:

cd desktop\contacts

13. Then type the following command and press enter:

copy *.vcf contacts.vcf
cmd1
Merge VCFs

14. That command will merge all the individual vcf’s into one business card, or as Android calls it, Vcard.

cmd2
vCard Created

15. Now just copy the contacts.vcf to your Android phones storage/SD card and open the contacts app. Press the menu button and choose the Import/Export option and select import from storage.

Android will look for the Vcard in the phones storage and import the contacts. This steps may however vary depending on your android version and/or manufacturer. I suggest you Google for your phone’s steps if you’ve problems finding the export/import option.

I hope that was easy as it seems to me. If you have any problems with the steps do please leave a comment and I’ll get to it as soon as possible.

On Why this Post is Here

Just thought I would add an introduction an epilogue to address the almost archaic subject matter presented here.

This post was actually written well over two years ago (2014) when S40 was still alive and kicking in my home country. It had appeared on an early iteration of this blog (a less ambitious one I might add) which never took off due to other commitments.

Anyway I thought should repost it here seeing it was serving no purpose sitting on my hard drive plus am pretty sure with their ridiculously awesome life span we knew them for, a good number of those Nokias are still out there. I should know, I see them when am out and about.

Lastly, as we eulogise the demise of Nokia let’s not forget the only reason we are actually using smartphones is partly due to the innovation spearhead by Nokia during the better part of the previous century and decade.

In a way I do miss the good old days when I could go for three straight days or more without charging my phone. Or how it never worried me if my phone happened to drop or if somebody stole it. You could easily get another Nokia for a cheap price without punching a hole in your budget or emotions for that matter.

Try losing your insanely expensive Android smartphone today and see what it does to you, your pocket and the people around you. Anyway it goes without saying, Nokia was truly a great brand, and they churned out dozens of quality durable phones, something you can hardly say of most smartphone manufacturers of this day and age.

We’ll truly miss it. Let’s see how Microsoft fairs (update: rather poorly it would seem).

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Kelvin Kathia

Kelvin Kathia is a writer that's passionate about sharing solutions to everyday tech problems. He's the founder and editor of Journey Bytes, a tech blog and web design agency. Feel free to leave him comments or questions regarding this post, or by leaving him a message on the contact page. If you found his content helpful, a donation is much appreciated.