Moving Contacts to the IPhone
March 30 2008 – For more on importing contacts to the IPhone see these pages:
- Generalized IPhone Contact Import
- Generalized IPhone Contact Import Part II
- Move Contacts – Motorola Rokker to iPhone – Part 1
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The only thing I didn’t like about my Rokker was the connector for the power charger which was lame and fragile. After a year of use, the phone would not recharge without much jiggling of the charger cable to get a good connection. Motorola tech support sent another unit but the replacement had the same problem with the power connector. Other than the problem with the charger connector, I loved the Rokker and would have kept it for a while longer. It had great audio quality, a great speaker phone and it played iTunes. However, when Apple dropped the price of the iPhone, I decided it was time to drop the Rokker for something new.
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Too bad Apple didn’t provide more options to import telephone numbers into the IPhone. Why not let owners import contacts from Yahoo, GMail, Excel or a simple, vanilla, CSV text file?
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For me, because of limited import options, moving phone numbers to the IPhone from my old Motorola Rokker was painful. The import relied on my Yahoo Contact list which wasn’t my most current list, and it still required manual rekeying.
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For Microsoft Windows users, ITunes imports contacts from Microsoft Outlook. So, if you run on Windows and your phone contacts aren’t stored in Outlook, you may have some work ahead of you.
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In my case, contacts were stored in the Rokker and in Yahoo, but not in Outlook, so I used the following workaround which isn’t so pretty.
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First, from Yahoo’s contact web page, copy / paste contact names and phone numbers into a text file. Then, email that text file to the IPhone and move it into a personal folder.
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Storing names and phone numbers in an email in a personal folder is useful, because the IPhone converts phone numbers into links which, when clicked, pops up the phone dialer. So, without re-keying names and numbers, contact phone numbers from the Rokker are available on the IPhone. More on personal email folders.
