Transferring Contacts from BlackBerry to Android

Transferring Contacts from BlackBerry to Android

With more users transferring from Blackberry to Android phone, no thanks to the iNo-One usurping the throne of the non-camera phone, users may find a challenge in migrating their contacts especially now that Google Sync is down.

If you had Blackberry Internet Services (BIS), that’s not too much of an issue as the default Blackberry OS supports Google synchronization through BIS. However, if you hadn’t sign up and were using Google Sync previously, Google have stopped access to the application and also terminated their server support as well for the service. That kinda leaves Google users hanging dry. Well, there are a couple of solutions to migrate your contacts from your Blackberry over to your new Android device.

If you had synchronized your Blackberry with your computer, that’s an easy option. Through the Blackberry Desktop Software, the contacts from the phone can be exported as a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file and then imported into Google through their web service (contacts.google.com). It’s a good time to also clean up the online database as well.

Next up – 10 Steps to transfer your contacts from BlackBerry to Android. Bluetooth transfer is another easy option.

blackberry transfer contacts android

  1. Once your Android phone has been setup with a Google Account, turn on Bluetooth.
  2. On your Blackberry device, select Blackberry Options -> Settings -> Mobile Backup.
  3. Turn on Wireless Sync to YES
  4. Press “SYNC NOW”

  5. Now, enable Bluetooth for your BlackBerry and pair both devices to each other
  6. Go to Blackberry’s Bluetooth setup, you would see the paired devices there, and select the Android phone.
  7. Press the enter key or trackpad, and the device menu will pop up.
  8. Select “Transfer Contacts”
  9. Your Android device will now popup a request to accept a file named ‘Phonebook.vcf’.
  10. Accept it to transfer the contacts over.

Do note however, the BlackBerry OS will not transfer contacts that do not have a number. If the contact only has a email address or mailing address or Facebook ID, then the contact would not be transferred.

address-book-sync

soocial

Now on to the last option. Soocial (http://www.soocial.com), which basically syncs all your contacts to your phones, emails and computers through their online service. It’s a freemium type of service and a free account allows synchronization twice a day, which would be sufficient for our purposes. Soocial is built up to support BlackBerry with two versions to cater for your BlackBerry OS from 4.5 all the way up to 7.0. Using it is similar to Google Sync, install the program, sign up and register, then perform the synchronization.