King of Excellent (according to Scaryduck)

Monday, July 26

On compatibility in phones

I found my old Nokia N73. Since my old faithful N95 broke, I've been using a crappy Sony Ericsson W350i. It was cheap (£20) and already on the Orange network, so I didn't have to worry about it being unlocked. The N73 is very good, but unfortunately the screen back light is failing, so I've ordered another screen from fleabay. The problem comes when I try to transfer all my contacts over.Now before some of you chime up with "copy them all to your sim," I can't. It's 368 contacts, and a sim will only store 256. Looking around on t'internet doesn't yield much help either. So, using my bluetooth adapter and the accompanying phone's pc suite, I downloaded all of my contacts on to the PC. I could then do more with them.
The contact information is stored as a 'vCard' which is like a digital version of a business card. Unfortunately, Sony Ericsson use version 3, whilst Nokia use version 2.1. This means that neither works on the other phone, which is both crap and inconvenient. I then tried to convert them to CSV (comma separated values, kinda like excel) and again they both aren't compatible. After much searching of Nokia Forums and turning nothing up trumps, I decided to take the bull by the horns. Being the nerdy programmer, I thought I'd first have a look at the vcard file (.vcf). Sure enough it's just a text file. It contains the version number, it also contains the other information with lots of colons and semi-colons in it. It's just the order these colons and semi-colons that seems to be the problem. So I wrote me a program to convert it.
Presenting, for all those sad gits out in googleland, "How to convert a Sony Ericsson vcf to Nokia." Download it here.

I thank you. *Takes a bow*