Choosing the next mobile

[RogerS]

OK...who's the Daddy? It has been reprieved. For the benefit of anyone else who comes up against this problem, this is how you do it.

Export your contact details as a vcf file. Use one of the free converter programmes and convert it to gmail format.

Create a new gmail account. Import your contact file.

Create your gmail account on your Ace 2 (reckon it should work with any Android phone) and let it sync to your main gmail account in the cloud. Should pull in your contacts and put them in the phone just like they were before.

 

[JakeS]

Good to hear you've got your main problem sorted (if you'll excuse the pun) but for what it's worth - on my Galaxy S, using the default Samsung contacts list, I can change the sort and display by:

- Open contacts
- Menu button
- More
- Display Options

In the display options, there's a "Sort by" which gives me a choice of "Surname" or "First Name", and a "Display contacts by", which gives me a choice of "First name first" or "Surname first".

(If you do have a Google account paired with your phone, it's also worth (IMO) going into the "Choose Contacts to Display" section of the Display Options and unticking all the groups you don't care to see on your phone.)




That said, my girlfriend has a Galaxy Ace, and while the vast majority of the OS is identical, there are small changes here and there... so there's a chance these steps won't be exactly the same on your phones.

 

[RogerS]

Jake...same thing on the Ace.but ........

take a name from the Sony Ericcson ...say, 'Smith and Rodgers'.....all in one data field called Name.

Now feed that into the Samsung and it decides that this Name really should be split into

First Name..Smith

Last name ....and Rodgers

The display also truncated fields and added numbers from somewhere or other.

 

[JakeS]

Now feed that into the Samsung and it decides that this Name really should be split

I suspect this was all part of taking it off the SIM, to be honest - the SIM doesn't have separate fields for first and last name and the phone thinks it's being clever and useful... and I seem to recall noticing weird extra data in contacts pulled from SIMs in the past; I wonder if some phones use null-terminated strings and don't bother to null out the entire however-many-characters storage, or some phones embed other metadata in the text portion, or something like that... did you have alternate numbers stored for any of these or anything like that?


(All the same, I'm pretty sure I had the opposite problem with my Galaxy S - "John Smith" on the SIM became a contact with no first name and a surname of "John Smith" when imported, which also made searching pretty difficult since I was expecting it to be ordered by surname!)

 

[RogerS]

Could well be. One of my thoughts was to massage the data using Excel or similar into a suitable form for the Samsung but couldn't find out where the contact data file was kept. Anyway, it's as I had it on the old phone so I'm happy. Bloody quick phone !

 

[RogerS]

wobblycogs, I think that it was you who was against Apples way of doing things? Having used my Galaxy for a while, I can assure you that google is just as bad!

 

[mailee]

I don't know if it's my age but technology seems to have passed me by as far as phones and computers are concerned. I have a Samsung phone that has far more features then I would ever need with a touch screen that seems to have a mind of it's own! All I need is a phone that I can make phone calls on and send text messages with a very loud tone. The girl in the phone shop who was trying to sell me a new one looked stunned when I told her I wanted a phone with a 42" screen a ringer like Big Ben and a computer sized keypad. :lol: needless to say I ended up with this heap of electronic doo doo. :roll: