Transfer of contacts from prior phone - problems -

[lyronva]

I got the Samsung Galaxy SIII a few weeks ago, but this may apply to any Android platform.

I had a Palm Treo 700W until 2010 and accumulated about 800 contacts. I went iPhone for a couple of years (without transferring the contacts) but got a Galaxy III a couple of weeks ago and finally wanted to get all those contacts into the new phone. These contacts are broken up into about 8 categories - I am able to transfer (via Bluetooth) any vcf file - for "All", or any of the 8 categories, but the contacts don't make it into the contact list on the new phone (it says incompatible file format when I try to open the .vcf file). What is so odd is that when doing all these categories, I did "Unfiled" (which only contained 2 contacts) and those contacts made it into the contact list just fine (and without having to open the vcf file, which is also different from all the other categories). Any idea what it is I'm doing wrong? Is it the # of contacts in each category that's making the transfer belch?

Doing this via getting the file from the backup SD card in the Treo would be fine as long as I could figure out a way to do it - I'm looking to transfer calendar, memos, etc. as well (from Treo & iPhone) once I figure out how.

Thanks in advance everybody -

B

 

[lyronva]

In case this would help anyone in this situation:

What ended up working was sending the "All" address book via Bluetooth (as a .vcf) to the SGIII, then mailing that to my GMail account, then opening, then going into contacts on the SGIII and importing (or merging, or syncing, I actually don't recall). It appears that all the contacts made it through intact (the exceptions are the cases where I had addresses that had 2 lines, such as "1301 Elm St (carriage return) Suite 400, Des Moines, IA 50301" - and all that comes through is "1301 Elm St/" - but a small price to pay.

The one real detrimental effect is that by adding all those contacts saved over the years the phone book takes five and a half minutes to load into my car's Bluetooth system, which leads to a question - how do I disable the car automatically downloading the phone book and just making the connection via bluetooth so I can still manually dial, or dial with voice by reciting the phone #? Is that a change I need to make on the phone end or the car end?

Thanks for the help -

B