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(0 comments) show comments Import those frickin' contacts on your Nokia N Series (Th feb. 5th, '09 at 00:09 am)

My Nokia N96

Today I got my Nokia N96 Smartphone thing because I washed all life out of my previous Sony-Ericsson K600i.

I spent quite a few moments figuring out what phone I'd want, because it ain't cheap the amount of euros you cough up during your phone contract. N96 seemed very cool but there were some annoyances to begin with.

If you just want to read about the contact importing stuff, skip the following part.

Nokia N96 Annoyances

The phone is made of the same stuff the FBI uses to collect finger prints.
When open (slidephone), the 'silent' vibrate is quite the chainsaw.
Native camera movie player is Real Player. WTF!? (But it seems to work better than freeware players, unlike on PC)
The Symbian S60v3 software is annoyingly slow more often than not, very bad considering the dual core 200 MHz ARM processor it has.
Speaking of dual 200 MHz ARM, my GP2x has a similar processor yet plays unrescaled DivX and XviD tv-shows back fluently. This phone can hardly make 2 frames per second! (and requires an external player) Aparently, Nokia's stupid employees didn't realize some hardware MP4 codec optimizations would turn this phone into a seriously craved object.
After installing the PC Suite, something totally unrelated will be fucked up on your PC.
A few texts and your battery lasts week. Play around with WiFi, aGPS, movies, and you'll be charging twice a day.

And to make up for it a little bit:
Nokia N96 recommended (free) software

Screenshot - only if you for some reason like to make screenshots.
Opera Mini - It's free (as opposed to Opera Mobile) and fast and syncs with your Desktop Opera.
Google Maps - aGPS enabled, sweet for getting lost in the city and doing geochaching. Not good as car navigation though. Version 3 (out this month) includes Google Latitude.
Gmail - much sweeter and faster than going to the website.
DivX Mobile Player - Play those movies on your phone
Messengers: Google Talk, MSN, Skype, Y!, ICQ, AIM (etc) all in one. (A bit dubious though. Why are calls routed? What happens to your contact list data? What happens to your passwords?)
Nimbuzz (Made in the Netherlands)
Fring (Made in Israel) (Slow)
eBuddy (Made in the Netherlands) (No Skype)
Talkonaut (Made in Russia) (No Skype, but VoIP in almost all other clients)
PuTTY for Symbian OS - PuTTY for Symbian. SSH into your linux machine when away from home.
Y-Browser - File Browser that shows hidden files, lets you to make command shortcuts and has a search function.
Jbak TaskMan - Replace your Task Manager with an advanced tool. It can terminate programs that have chrashed without removing your battery.
Calcium Calculator - For simple math, this one is actually not a burden to use.
Nokia Barcode Reader - Let's you download stuff to your phone (from for example Symbian-Freeware.com) by scanning a barcode. Concidering the default crap that's on the phone, it's an idiot mistake that Nokia didn't include this by default.

Anyway, those contacts..

Contacts from my Sony-Ericsson K600i

Oh yeah, my sweet SE. I always hate the big fat stupid closed nontransparent computer-hogging annoying crashprone idiot software manufacturers want you to use with your software. Nokia N series is absolute king in this area. But for any Sony-Ericsson phone, there's a superb piece of software out there: FloAt's Mobile Agent. But, this article is not about that. Let's just say I easily synced all my contacts with FMA 2.1.

Contacts to my Nokia N96

Normal sync between phones does not work. Nokia is not complying with standards. So we need to force-feed our contacts to the phone, somehow. And afaik, connectivity is not yet possible through small and free 3rd party apps, so we'll need the included phone PC software.

Nokia's PC Suite looks nice, like steam, but hey did I ask for custom skins? I already have Windows' themes in the computer's memory so why don't you just cut the crap. Yeah I'm sorry, it annoyed me with every click. Even though I permitted the installer to install the latest versions of components from the Internet, it still wants to do an update for every click you make. I had to reboot 3 times. And it's a known fact in Windows word, that software that needs your computer to reboot fucks up your Windows installation, something you'll only want for very important apps.

Oops, was letting myself go again. Turns out PC Suite will only sync contacts with Outlook Express (or some other apps no one uses), which any descent computer user has ripped out of their Windows installation CD anyway. And there's no free software that imitates Windows' addressbook.wab.

FMA doesn't export .csv files, and PC Suite doesn't import them anyway. So.. we're just have to do it ourselves.
I assume you've got basic knowledge, so you'll understand when my examples are not meant literally.

Look for the file that stores your FMA contacts.

D:\Document and Settings\User\Application Data\FMA\Phone Name [IMEI]\dat\Contacts.ME.dat

Luckily, it's readable text. Open it in a regular expression capable text editor (such as Notepad++).

You'll see every contact has a structure like this:

"Name Surname/M",##########,#,#,{some-id-like-number},"someothernumber"

Where # represents some number. I don't know and don't really care what all those numbers mean, except that the first one is obviously the phonenumber and /M (or /O|/W|/H) represent different sorts of numbers (Mobile, Other, Work, Home).

We are going to convert this to a .csv file. Regular expression replace the following search/replace pairs:


 # Ignore lines starting with #
 # We'll figure a structure like:
 # Name,Cell,Work,Home,Other
 
 # /M Cell Phones
 /M",([^,]+),.+$
 ",\1,,,
 
 # /W Work Phones
 /W",([^,]+),.+$
 ",,\1,,
 
 # /H Home Phones
 /H",([^,]+),.+$
 ",,,\1,
 
 # /O Other Phones
 /O",([^,]+),.+$
 ",,,,\1
 
 # You get what you are doing?

Now you've got a list with lines like this:

"Name Surname",##########,,,
 "Name Surname",,,##########,

Most contacts probably have one number anyway, but here's the annoying part:
Look for all names that are duplicates. They have multiple numbers. Combine the lines so that the phone numbers line up in their correct .csv space. The above example would resolve to this:

"Name Surname",##########,,##########,

There is probably a multiline regular expression to be made up for this, but I couldn't come up with one before I lost my patience. If you got one, please post a message below. (Multiline regexp can only be done on Notepad++ with the menu Plugins > TextFX Quick > Find/Replace (Ctrl + R).)
Done? Now, make sure that none of the names have a comma in it. And then, remove all the "quotes" because they are obsolete for vCards. (Easy: Replace-all them with nothing and they are gone.)

Name Surname,##########,,##########,

This is also the time to do some name editing you've always wanted to do, because it's much easier now than later in your phone.

Now, someone has written this superb JS .csv to vCard converter! Go there and enter the labels on the first line:

Name,Cell,Work,Home,Other

Copy-paste our edited contact list on the following lines, and go to the next tab.
Link data to labels like so:

and click on the 3rd tab.
Copy this data into a new text file and we're ready for some final processing.

Editing the vCard list

We've now got a vCard list in v3.0 format. This is something my brand new Nokia does not support.
It will work, but it will store all types of phone numers as regular phone numbers. I learned from Wikipedia that a quick fix would be to search-and-replace all

TEL;type=

into

TEL;

so that the 3.0 new phone identify markup thing is removed.

Since Nokia also does not support the list vCards, we need to cut 'em all up. Sucks, right?

Yeah I thought so, too. I created a tool in php that splits the vCard, returning you a zip with snippets:
tools.rednet.nl/plugins/vcfsplit.php

Now save this new vCard list as something.vcf and upload it to the tool. Open the .zip that it outputs, and drag those files to your (as mass storage connected) phone in the following folder (or it will not work):

E:\Others\Contacts\

Now close your connection and detach your phone. Go to your contact list and delete everything that is also in the list you're about to import. (Doubles are annoying.)
Navigate to Options > Copy business card > From Other Memory > E: Mass Memory and wait while the progress bar is looking promising.

..

Tadah! Phone categories are kept.

If you used to use a lot more details in your contacts, like notes, titles, addresses and such, you'll need to figure some extra tricks. I never used those options anyway. Hey, it's just a phone!

You're welcome to post your hints below. Smile

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