I am getting a new cell phone this week (well I’m “inheriting” my son’s old one) and I need to export all of my contacts from my old phone to my new one. Usually I would save all of my contacts to the SIM card and just put that in the new phone. The problem I’m having is that my old phone takes a standard sized SIM, while my new one uses a micro SIM so I can’t do it that way. The only option I know of is to manually type in my hundred or so contacts In the new phone. There has got to be a better way and if there is I’m sure that someone here knows how.
If it helps my provider is TMobile. My old phone is a Samsung Galaxy S4 and my new one is an LG Nexus 4, both are Android phones. Thanks in advance for the help.
My provider did that for me with some plug in device when I last changed phones. Didn’t cost me anything. Mind you the shop was only a 5 minute walk from where I work.
I should add that he had to transfer my data that way because my SIM wouldn’t work in the new phone. And don’t you have to see them to preserve your number anyway?
With a GS4, you can sync your contacts with an email account. Just sync the new phone with the same email and all your contacts will sync with that, too.
I got a new phone about six months ago and since the old phone was synced to a Gmail account, as soon as I set up that account on the new phone, all my contacts came down from Gmail.
Actually, on re-reading, a couple things. One, I have a GS4 and mine takes a micro SIM, I can’t imagine yours would be different. And two, I’m just really curious, why change to a slightly older (a whole 5 months) phone with slightly inferior specs? It’s like trading a GS4 for a GS3. Both nice phones, but trading even slightly down seems counterintuitive.
I learned yesterday that phones etc passed on to parents by their offspring are called hand-me-ups. Obviously a derivative of hand-me-down, where clothes etc went from older to younger siblings.
Yeah, the OP must not use Gmail, because if s/he did, it’s kind of the SOP of any Android phone to use Gmail’s contact list, which is cloud based. If you’re using the phone’s own contact list (distinct from Gmail’s), then I think you can just get a Gmail account, copy that list to Gmail’s cloud contact list, and then access it with the new phone by the same means in reverse. You could even just copy it to the new phone’s memory and get rid of the Gmail account when you’re done. But why not just use Google’s contact list from now on (unless you have a problem with Google in particular, which I can understand)?
It’s not really the case unless you have a vanilla Android phone (like the Nexuses, the designated dev phones, some Motorola phones, etc.) Several manufacturers like HTC and Samsung like to store the contacts by default either on the SIM card or their own stupid contact manager, independent of Google’s. It’s part of the overall Android fragmentation issue – third party OEMs will replace Google’s integrated solution with their own crap so they can keep their customers used to proprietary solutions instead of the Android default.
Perhaps I’ve got my phone models mixed up, the Galaxy is the original one, not the new one. The Nexus is definitely a step up. Or son seems to upgrade phones every six months or so and quite honestly I don’t really care if I have the latest and greatest. The Nexus will work just fine for me. I remember when my first cell phone did nothing but make calls AND it was attached to my car. Imagine, $1500 for a phone that had to be mounted in your car and calls cost if I remember right close to $1 per minute. My God I’m old.