How to Transfer contacts / phone numbers to brand new BlackBerry Phone

I recently got my new Blackberry 8520 Curve and have decided to write my experience here in the Mobile section with you all. I wasn’t only excited but was thinking from a very long time on How to start with a new phone and this is the first and but obvious step :  Bringing the contacts to new phone from old phone. Here are the options which we have :

Via Bluetooth :

Depending on your phone type and software your phone can let you send contact via bluetooth. In Nokia n72 series I can select all contact and send them via bluetooth and I did transfer some for testing. Just pair up your phones and then send along the details.

Via Sim Copy :

This is a very plain old method that always work if nothing works. You can copy all your contacts from phone to sim first and then in the Blackberry do the following steps :

• Go to Contacts.
• Press the Menu Button ( which acts like right-click )
• Select Sim Phone Book. This will list out all the sim contacts.
• Again click the menu button.
• Select ” Copy to all contacts “.

This will transfer all the contact’s detail from Sim to blackberry phone.

Via Lookout Online Service :

Lookout is a free online service which brings Data backup, Antivirus and Mobile tracking service but another beauty of this service is that it lets you transfer all the data from one phone to another including contacts over the air. You need not to connect to your PC at all but you will need a working internet connection and must have a handset already registered and backed up once. Read complete details here.

Sync with Outlook :

This is one of the most common methods but I am avoiding it this time as it brings me more email id that numbers but if you have organized your Outlook Contact Book nicely, this is the option for you. You can use Syncamatic for over the air transfer.Read more about it.

Transferring via CSV files :

If your old phone software support exporting contacts via CSV ( I did with my Nokia PC software ), you can use the CSV file to import. However there is one catch here. Sometimes due to format mismatch between black berry contact style and other phones you might get some issues and this is primarily because of the header mismatch.

For both the above you will need to have Blackberry Desktop Manager installed on your computer which you would have got it along with the Blackberry Boxpack. When you connect the phone that Blackberry desktop manager pops up.

• Select Synchronize from the Menu Items.
• Then look for Menu item Synchronization under configure menu. Then click on Synchronization button ( Thats too much of Synchronization, RIM should change it ).
• This will open a window displaying all the items which can be synced like Calendar, Memo Pad, Address book and Tasks.
• Click Next and you would get option to Import contacts from Outlook , Outlook express, ASCII importer or CSV file andYahoo. Yahoo option will ask for credentials first.
• You can select both way or one way mode of synchronization.

So now over to you. Whats your story of bringing the contacts into the BlackBerry