Tutorial: Move your Verizon contacts from your deactivated RAZR to your iPhone

So I stood in an utterly unglorious line for 7 hours last Friday. At 9:30, I got in line behind millions thousands hundreds of folks exactly like me in one respect: we all had a pathological fixation on the single goal of attaining a certain kind of phone before the end of the day.  The phone in question, I hardly need to mention, is a new 3G iPhone.

And it’s a great phone.  But over the past couple of years on Verizon Wireless, I have been unable to sync my phone’s contacts with my computer’s contacts.  Verizon has a service called Backup Manager, which I used, and on the few occasions when I needed to restore my phone’s contact list, this worked well.  But I initially had to manually input every entry into that phone (btw, a Motorola RAZR), and I didn’t relish the prospect of doing that again.

Looking for a lazier approach than manual transfer, I asked the twitternets for an answer.  Jonathan Snook (@snookca) pointed me to an iPhone Setting which allows an iPhone user to transfer contacts stored on another SIM card.  But Verizon’s a CDMA carrier, so there’s no SIM card to be had.  Brynn Evans (@bmevans) suggested I use backup manager in conjunction with a mysterious-yet-promising hack cooked up by Chris Messina (@factoryjoe).  An outstanding idea, and Chris was quick to confirm that he did, indeed, have such a hack on hand.  But Verizon stymied this plan by disallowing my login to Backup Assistant.  Despite the fact that I could still log into “My Account” on Verizon, apparently Backup Assistant is tied to discrete phone numbers.  Since my phone number had been taken away from them, they explained, my contacts backup was gone forever.  (Hogwash, I think, but this was the end of this exploration.)

So here’s the thing: even though the lazy options had been exhausted, there’s a not-at-all-difficult way to do move your contacts off your Verizon phone, but it requires you to have a discoverable bluetooth on your computer.  Here’s how it works.  You should be able to follow these steps to accomplish the same result – which is to say: easily move your contacts from your Verizon phone to your iPhone.

1. Turn your computer’s bluetooth on, and make sure it’s discoverable.
2. Turn on your Verizon phone’s bluetooth, and pair it with your computer.  (Never mind the fact that you’ve never found any good reason to do this before, you’ve got a great reason to do it now.)
3. If your computer’s a Mac, it will ask you what, in general, you’d like to do with files sent to it via bluetooth.  Create a folder on your desktop.  Name it something like “Files I Got Via Bluetooth.”
4. Select Contacts on your phone.
5. Select Options.
6. Scroll all the way to the bottom of that ridiculous list.  See the one that says, “Send Name Card.”  Select it.
7. Only one card will have been selected (likely the first on your contacts list).  Hit the “Add” softkey option, and select “Add All.”
8. Press “Send.”  It’s going to ask you where to send them.  You’re going to tell it to send to the computer to which you just paired your phone.
9. On your computer, notice all the activity.  You may need to confirm that it’s okay with you for the transfer to happen.  You may not.  Either way, if you go look inside the folder where your computer accepts bluetooth transfers, you’re going to see a ton of vcards (.vcf files) – one for each contact on your Verizon cell phone.  This is a very good thing.  It means you got that stuff out of the vault that is your now-useless old cell phone.
10. If you’re on a Mac, select all (Command+A) of those vcard files and open them.  I use Address Book, so that’s what I used.  If you use Entourage, fine.  Address Book will lead you through a duplicate removal/merge process, after which your old contacts will officially be part of your Address Book contacts.  Now you can move them onto your iPhone.  If you’re using MobileMe and have Push properly configured, your new contacts will arrive on your iPhone shortly with no further effort from you.  If not, there’s one more step.
11. The next time you sync your iPhone, make sure you’ve got Sync Contacts selected in iTunes.  Your contacts list on your iPhone will update itself, and your once trapped contacts from your old Verizon phone are now happily alive and usable on your iPhone.

I hope this works for you.  It worked for me like a charm.  But one little footnote: As I write this, it’s 11:00 PM.  I devised this method at 6:00 PM.  In the 5 hours since then, I’ve had hours of unrelated conversation over a big meal, and I re-stained a 150-year old dresser. My RAZR is sitting in my desk drawer at work, so my terminology might be slightly off. This tutorial was revised and now accurately reflects the Verizon OS’s language.

If you use this approach, I’d love your feedback.

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