Hello everyone. I'm a new N900 owner, purchasing explicitly because I am fed up with the iPhone's lockdown. However, I've run into a little frustration trying to get my old iPhone contacts onto my N900.

The iPhone, through iTunes, will spit your contacts out into ".contact" files, with all your relevant data in place. On Win7, it spits them into the Contacts folder as "windows contacts" filetypes. Now, I'm trying best to figure out how to get these into a format that the N900, and hopefully ALL open source programs will like. What are your suggestions?

Windows Contacts can export in 2 ways - a single .csv, or individual vCards. The single .csv has been a DISASTER. Something is wrong in the formatting, and trying to get Thunderbird to take the CSV string through its import, fails miserably. vCards seem to fare a little better, but don't seem to natively import to Thunderbird.

Does anyone have experience in transforming ".contact" files with all necessary and relevant data into something Maemo accepts? It would be even better if it was a universal format that would work in most open source mail/contact programs.

Also, once you get this done where do you PUT the file? Lets say once I have a file or files ready in a form Maemo understands and my N900 connected via USB to my PC. Where exactly do I copy and paste the files to? Should it be in Mass Storage Mode? Or is there something special that needs to be done in PC Suite etc... ? I even downloaded Ovi Suite before finding out that it doesn't support the N900.

Any ideas how to make this go smoothly? Thanks.

You might be able to import the .csv file into Google Contacts and then use "Mail for Exchange" syncing to sync your Google contacts to your N900. The MfE syncing is kind of buggy but I was able to get it to work. I already had my contact list in Google contacts from an earlier time. One time I had my N900 empty contacts list overwrite my full Google contacts list thereby deleting it. I then had to rebuild the Google contacts list from a saved .csv file so I'm pretty sure you can do if you can get Mail for Exchange to work for you. There is a message thread about this very subject on this site. Good luck and Happy New Year!
-- Don

What I did was sync the iphone with google and then sync google with the N900 using MfE (Mail for Exchange) + nuevasync.com.... Happy new year!

yeah exchange is pretty much youre only option. wont sync anywhere else (with little fuss)

From what I remember from other threads, vcards should work. It should also be possible to put everything into a single .vcf file and import it with Contacts. This I have not yet been able to verify myself though, because there's an unresolved bug which prevents the N900 from receiving full .vcf files via bluetooth.

Apple Address Book => (iSync) => Nokia E70 => ("N900 Transfer & Sync") => N900

I haven't worked through how to make this a reliable, bi-directional sync path.

There is an apparently resolved bug related to iSync support, so it is possible that Nokia will offer a plug-in sometime after the next (first) firmware update.

Okay! I managed to get them on by taking the individual vcards from Windows Contact export, importing them to Google Contacts, and then exporting a single .vcf (vCard). Then I copied and pasted the file to the documents folder, which for some reason was ONLY accessible when the thing was not plugged in/in mass storage mode.

That seems to be a little issue.You can't browse/check to see if the things you have imported have made it, until you disconnect from the PC!

@Ellipsys: The filesystem can only be visible by either the N900 or the PC, it cannot be visible by both at the same time. So it's automatically unmounted when you plug in the PC. This is because it's a simple export-filesystem feature, it's not a full-blown shared filesystem setup as e.g. samba/cifs or NFS.

i usually use SyncML. the n900 specs say "SyncML Over BT and USB." how do u do SyncML over bt and usb??? ive always just done it wirelessly with ovi and zyb. can the n900 really not do SyncML with the cloud? wow im amazed at how much stuff im discovering the n900 cant do. i was so excited for it.

Hi I have exacly this problem. Before reflash it was working, but I don't know why.. so this must be do fix

Any ideas?