Contact Importing
 

I keep all of my contacts from my Symbian devices in a folder on my desktop PC. I've copied the folder to the N900's mass memory. I'm trying to import them to the N900 Contacts app. I see how to do it, but it only lets me import one at a time, which is bad for me since I have hundreds of Vcards.

Any way to select all and import?:confused:

Re: Contact Importing
 

What devices do you have?
I had problems importing to N900 using PC Suite.

What I did was, import all the contacts you need to transfer to the N900 into PC Suite and sync it to an Symbian device (in my case N97)

Then on the N900, choose Import in Contacts and use Retrieve Data
Turn on the Bluetooth on the N97, the N900 should now be able to find it and start pulling all the contacts & calendars & notes from the N97 into N900

PC Suite does suck and Ovi Suite isn't support yet.
Nokia should really get this fix. Perhaps delaying the N900 was a good idea to get the ground structures all implemented first before releasing the device that none of Nokia software can fully support it.

Re: Contact Importing
 

I managed to copy my contacts from my N95 8GB to my N900. No problem using the sync function over bluetooth.
As well as calender/notes, too bad I can't transfer my bookmarks and SMS.:(

Re: Contact Importing
 

No easy way to import contacts? Wow Nokia!!!

Re: Contact Importing
 

I don't think you guys understand. I'm testing the capabilities of the device. I already know about BT transfer. What I'm trying to do is transfer from PC to device. I've already copied all of the contacts to the mass memory via drag and drop. But to add them to Contacts, I have to add them one at a time. Is there a way to add all or select all? How do you select multiple items to add?

Re: Contact Importing
 

I don't have a S60 phone. All my contacts are in my Palm Treo 680 using Palm OS. I back them up to Outlook.

Is there no way to import directly from Outlook? Certainly that can't be?

Re: Contact Importing
 

les_garten: You can sync N900 with Outlook using Nokia PC Suite.

Have somebody found way how to get messages from Symbian devices to N900?

Re: Contact Importing
 

Chris, use the PC Suite programme, that's what it was designed for. As for importing multiple vcards, I couldn't even do that on my S60 device.

Re: Contact Importing
 

Well to make your life easier it might have exported all your contacts to a single .vcf file.

I don't imagine that people importing hundreds of vCards is a normal use-case. If it's a specific problem for you, as you can't use sync or go back and export as a single .vcf, the code necessary to import them is pretty simple so you could write yourself a little app to import them all.

When I moved from my 6300 I just told PC Suite to backup my contacts, attached the N900 and told it to restore them to it.

Re: Contact Importing
 

I moved from an E61 - the N900 just dragged the whole set via bluetooh sync and worked fiune. Even had the thumbnails.

Re: Contact Importing
 

Unless you use a program that doesn't export contacts to a single file, like... bbdb for instance

Maybe not, but for GNU, is this such a special case? I've got this problem.

I haven't developed for the N900 yet.

Could you give me a hint, so that I can write this, just a simple commandline app, no hildon UI stuff etc.. Where can I look for the code? Thanks.

Re: Contact Importing
 

http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/...dress_Book_API

and
http://maemo.org/api_refs/5.0/5.0-fi...book/ch01.html
http://maemo.org/api_refs/5.0/5.0-final/libosso-abook/

Re: Contact Importing
 

If you've migrated from Symbian, then you probably have imported hundreds of vcf files. We could just drag and drop, then sync from the contact app. Not possible with Maemo. pretty stupid for something we call a computer. Why does a computer need a computer? I can keep stuff in my Files on Ovi account and retrieve them online, but I have to add to COntacts one by one.

Re: Contact Importing
 

Chris, if you have a vcard with multiple contacts in it will the N900 split the contacts out, or will it only load the first contact in the file?

If it splits them out, then you could always write a bat file to combine multiple vcards and then import that., this is what I did with my N97 and google

Re: Contact Importing
 

that's beyond my skill level. and I don't know how to combine my 300+ contact into one anyway. what phone does that? Please don't recommend a desktop app. I only use mobile platforms.

Re: Contact Importing
 

Technically you can't have a vcard with multiple contacts. What you can have is file with multiple vcards in it. The N900 Contacts app can import that w/o any problem.

I maintain my contacts in Evolution. I saved my entire addressbook as single vcard file. Scp'ed it the N900 and imported the vcard file in Contacts apps. All of my contacts got imported with no problem. I just had to merge IM server contacts with my imported contacts.

Re: Contact Importing
 

The N900 Mobile Computer can do that. If you can get your 300+ vcards copied to the N900, it's trivial to combine them into 1 file. If the file names are something like 'xxxxx.vcf', you would do something like this in the Xterminal.

cat *.vcf > combined.vcf

Yes. It is just that simple.

Re: Contact Importing
 

I downloaded all my gcontacts in vcard format then synced them all in a oner with my n900, hope this helps.

Re: Contact Importing
 

do I type it exactly as above?

Re: Contact Importing
 

OK a more intensive howto. First you need to have all of you contacts vcards copied into your N900. It's best if you can put them all into the same location (i.e. in a folder under Mydocs). And the command to use depends on the files names of the vcard files. Evolution used the extension '.vcf' when I export my contacts. If you copied all of you contacts vcards to a separate folder it makes things even easier.

I'll give step by step for 2 scenarios. First files named 'xxxx.vcf' dumped into MyDocs along with everything else.

1. Start up the X Terminal application
2. enter the command the following commands

That will concatenate all of you individual vcards into a large vcard file called 'combined.vcf'

3. Go into Contacts -> Menu -> Get Contacts -> Import contact file.
4. drill down into your named N900 folder and you should see the file 'combined.vcf'
5. Select 'combined.vcf' and let Contacts do it's thing.


Another scenario, you copied all of you contacts to a folder under MyDocs (i.e. the 25GB mass storage partition). Let's assume the folder name is called 'contacts'.

1. Start up the X Terminal application
2. enter in the following commands

Note: in this case it doesn't matter what the vcard file named as. The asterisk ('*') wll pick up all of the files in the contacts folder.

3. Go into Contacts -> Menu -> Get Contacts -> Import contact file.
4. drill down into your named N900 folder -> contacts folder and you should see the file 'combined.vcf'
5. Select 'combined.vcf' and let Contacts do it's thing.

Edit: And yes, syntax for those commands is very important. But you really can't hurt anything if you get it wrong. ;)

Re: Contact Importing
 

great tutorial. should be a separate thread locked to only be used as a guide. why don't we have threads like that here? instead of hunting through hundreds of posts... thanks times ten

Re: Contact Importing
 

Hmm. As I can't sync with iSync on my Mac (due to https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2793) I thought I'd try and 'squirt' my contacts from my Z610i straight to my N900. For some bizarre reason, the N900 complains that there is "Not enough memory in target location". This is after I selected my 8GB card as the target for the transfer. Weird huh? Any ideas why this might be? There doesn't seem to be a problem writing files to /media/mmc1 and there's thousands of millions of bytes of space there ....

Re: Contact Importing
 

sounds like the N900 has a default bluetooth reception point in phone memory.

Re: Contact Importing
 

Well, the N900 initially offered Documents as the place to put the all-in-one vcf file and I got the previously mentioned error message. I then told it to put the file on the card whilst approving the transfer and got the same error message again.

I feel another trip to bugzilla coming on.

Re: Contact Importing
 

Yes, known problem. We have modified the dialog to allow import of multiple contacts. The feature should be available with the next but one update - if our other bugfixes are good enough to pass quality control.

Well, quite too late for you, but lardman gave a good hint: You could merge all your vcf files into one single vcf file and open that new file in the import dialog.

You can import up to 1000 contacts in one batch that way.

If you are brave you can use the terminal to create that merged file:

$ cd "MyDocs/.documents/Export Folder"
$ cat * > ../merged-contacts.vcf

Re: Contact Importing
 

thanks, hasselmm

Re: Contact Importing
 

If you want to see how this works.

Go Back to that dir with the vcf files and you can play with your cat command as well as ls

type 'ls -al | more" to see a dir of the files

then type "cat john_smith.vcf" or whatever the name is of one of the individual vcf files. You'll see the begin and end tags

then type "cat combined.vcf | more" to look at the concatenated file and how it was put together.

Don't type in the quotes and notice the pipe before more.

You can also just type "more combined.vcf" to see the file as well.

Spacebar to advance. Q to quit.

Re: Contact Importing
 

I've uploaded a little program to address that problem to Extras Devel:
http://maemo.org/packages/view/osso-abook-import-many/
http://gitorious.org/ebook-tools/osso-abook-import-many

Hopefully becomes obsolete soon.

Re: Contact Importing
 

Im trying to transfer my contacts from my blackberry via bluetooth with no luck as i keep getting a "FAILED" message, can anyone help?

Re: Contact Importing
 

I just posted a long blog article about My First 24-hours With the Nokia N900. Excerpt re: PIM Syncing:

I explored the following two PIM-sync scenarios:

1. Direct device-to-device syncing via Outlook and the Nokia PC Suite software: The software installed and ran just fine on my Lenovo T43p laptop running Windows7. Pairing the N900 with my laptop via Bluetooth took several tries, and required an updated driver from the Bluetooth component manufactureer. But once it was setup, I could sync Calendar, Contacts, and Notes between both devices using either the Nokia PC Suite software or Windows7’s built in Sync feature. I was also able to sync via the N900’s sync/charging USB cable. One detail I noticed however, is that when creating a new appointment in the N900’s built-in calendar I couldn’t find an option to invite others to it (a basic feature in Outlook/Exchange). I was able to sync 1200+ contacts to the device in about 15 minutes, and 200+ appointments in another 10 minutes.
2. Over-The-Air syncing via Nuevasync to my Google Calendar/Contacts: As a long time Windows Mobile user without my own Exchange Server, I’ve relied steadily on Nuevasync, a free service that provides synchronizing of Calendar/Contacts info via Exchange ActiveSync to your Google account. I configured my N900 to NuevaSync’s service but couldn’t get it working past the initial connection stage before it threw an error. NuevaSync appears to be seeking testers with N900’s in order to fix this. I’ve registered my interest in helping them out, and others might wish to do so in order to speed progress towards a workable solution. Also, I have to give a shout-out to OggSync’s product, which is how I automate syncing of my Outlook data to Google in the first place.

More here: My First 24-hours With the Nokia N900

Re: Contact Importing
 

Well, I managed to get the Address Book app's data on my Mac into a single vCard and now the N900 has ingested it, so that's a start. Some form of sync is obviously desirable though.

SMS transfer from N95 to N900
 

Can anyone advise the method of transferring SMS from N95 to N900 without using the sim, and to maintain the "sent" and "received-date" details??

Re: SMS transfer from N95 to N900
 

See this thread: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=430075.

This Google search
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=sit...ient=firefox-a
was how I found a set of topics, and then I looked for the highest numbered thread post--assuming that later posts will include the latest tips and techniques.

Re: Contact Importing
 

Damn, I've just been hit by this limit slap in the face. Exported my contacts from Google Apps into a single vcf file, and tried to import.

'Too many contacts' error.

Guess I'll delete all and split it in two.