So one of the first things when getting a new phone & carrier is of course to transfer all the contacts over, the problem is that anything in the process which is a microsoft product sucks majorly.
First try, using the 'Transfer my Data' feature, this transfers 3 contacts by blue tooth ( it doesn't tell me which, but I don't really care, I have over 250 contacts on my phone ).
Second try, taken from some thread on the internet, export all contacts as vcard 3.0, download 'microsoft email' or whatever it was called ( part of windows essentials ). Try to import into 'microsoft email' by drag and drop, get hit in the face with 250+ pop ups where it wants me to review every single contact. Okay, whatever, as long as I get my data over I can hit 'Ok' 250+ times in a row, but no, this crap thinks a vcard line in the form: TEL:ObviousPhoneNumber means 'discard this', it absolutely needs a mobile phone number in the form TEL;TYPE=CELL,VOICE:ObviousPhoneNumber. Okay, so this doesn't work, and now I have 250+ contacts that got synced to my microsoft account which contains absolutely nothing, just a name without any contact information. "Well, this should be easy, all the contacts which I want to remove is classified as address book, I should be able to filter this easily just as I do with gmail every day", well no, I can't, or if I can it's hidden somewhere real well in 'microsoft email'. So after spending the next 15 minutes scanning through all my contacts and deleting these manually I go for the next try.
Third try using Nokia PC-suite for my N900 I'm able to export everything over as csv, now since there's no native csv import in windows 8 phone it would seem I once again I have to rely on the fantastic program 'microsoft email'. Now the problem here is that the monkey which thought it smart to hard code all contact attributes in 'microsoft email' limits me to 4 different phone number fields, but the N900 csv which just as every other modern contact system allows arbitrary many phone fields per contact, tagged & named appropriately. So when my csv currently has 6 different kinds of numbers, 'Microsoft email' wants me to condense this into 4 hard coded ones it's impossible. So I think, hey at least let me map these 2 from my N900 to this single type in 'Microsoft email', and I'll resolve the conflicts manually, this however is not possible, you can only map 1 <-> 1.
Fourth try, import the csv into gmail and then sync that over. I load the csv in gmail, everything works EXTREMELY well, it finds & suggests duplicates among my gmail contacts flawlessly, it imports all the data flawlessly, heck it even lets me review all the import work before committing it to my real gmail contacts. Awesome, lets sync this over to the 920, but no, again windows 8 phone absolutely refuses to import the phone numbers.
So yeah, a good days work for something which should be incredibly easy & being one of the first impressions of the phone all I can say is who the **** designed this crap?
First try, using the 'Transfer my Data' feature, this transfers 3 contacts by blue tooth ( it doesn't tell me which, but I don't really care, I have over 250 contacts on my phone ).
Second try, taken from some thread on the internet, export all contacts as vcard 3.0, download 'microsoft email' or whatever it was called ( part of windows essentials ). Try to import into 'microsoft email' by drag and drop, get hit in the face with 250+ pop ups where it wants me to review every single contact. Okay, whatever, as long as I get my data over I can hit 'Ok' 250+ times in a row, but no, this crap thinks a vcard line in the form: TEL:ObviousPhoneNumber means 'discard this', it absolutely needs a mobile phone number in the form TEL;TYPE=CELL,VOICE:ObviousPhoneNumber. Okay, so this doesn't work, and now I have 250+ contacts that got synced to my microsoft account which contains absolutely nothing, just a name without any contact information. "Well, this should be easy, all the contacts which I want to remove is classified as address book, I should be able to filter this easily just as I do with gmail every day", well no, I can't, or if I can it's hidden somewhere real well in 'microsoft email'. So after spending the next 15 minutes scanning through all my contacts and deleting these manually I go for the next try.
Third try using Nokia PC-suite for my N900 I'm able to export everything over as csv, now since there's no native csv import in windows 8 phone it would seem I once again I have to rely on the fantastic program 'microsoft email'. Now the problem here is that the monkey which thought it smart to hard code all contact attributes in 'microsoft email' limits me to 4 different phone number fields, but the N900 csv which just as every other modern contact system allows arbitrary many phone fields per contact, tagged & named appropriately. So when my csv currently has 6 different kinds of numbers, 'Microsoft email' wants me to condense this into 4 hard coded ones it's impossible. So I think, hey at least let me map these 2 from my N900 to this single type in 'Microsoft email', and I'll resolve the conflicts manually, this however is not possible, you can only map 1 <-> 1.
Fourth try, import the csv into gmail and then sync that over. I load the csv in gmail, everything works EXTREMELY well, it finds & suggests duplicates among my gmail contacts flawlessly, it imports all the data flawlessly, heck it even lets me review all the import work before committing it to my real gmail contacts. Awesome, lets sync this over to the 920, but no, again windows 8 phone absolutely refuses to import the phone numbers.
So yeah, a good days work for something which should be incredibly easy & being one of the first impressions of the phone all I can say is who the **** designed this crap?
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Symbian phone.
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