Moving To an iPhone? Read This First.

ByMike Moffit

If you’ve recently purchased an iPhone, you’re probably asking yourself, “How do I get all my stuff to it?” People have a lot of information on their phone, whether or not it’s a smartphone, and it would be a pain to enter all those contacts in again. Fortunately, there are a few options to transfer them from one to the other.

If you’re an AT&T customer, you can transfer your contacts to one of the following: Mac Address Book, Outlook, Outlook Express, or Windows Mail. Depending on what kind of phone you have, you might be able to do it though Bluetooth, or through a USB cable specific to your phone. Once the contacts are on your computer, you can use iTunes to transfer your contacts to your new iPhone.

Another option is to transfer your contacts to your SIM card, then put the card in your new iPhone. Tap Settings, then go to Mail, Contacts, Calendars. You’ll see an option to Import SIM Contacts. A support page that explains all this in detail can be found here.

If both your old phone and your new iPhone are on Verizon, you may be able to use Backup Assistant. Before switching to your iPhone, download Backup Assistant to your old phone and sync your contacts to Verizon’s web site. (You may need to set up an online account with them first.) Once it’s complete, you can transfer your phone number to your new iPhone (this method only works if your phone number is the same between both phones.) Now go to the App Store and download VZ Contact Transfer. It will pull your contacts off Verizon’s storage site and put them on your iPhone. You can continue to use VZ Contact Transfer to back up your contacts, but you must sync at least once a month to keep the account active.

If you are transferring from Verizon to AT&T or Sprint, you can still use Backup Assistant to put your contacts onto Verizon’s cloud storage, but you will need to use the site’s export feature to save your contacts to your computer so you can import them into your Address Book and synchronize them via iTunes or iCloud. iCloud support is built into Mac OS X 10.7.2, or if you are on a Windows computer you can download the iCloud Control Panel from Apple to synchronize your iPhone wirelessly.

If you are upgrading from an earlier iPhone or another iOS device, as long as you were already using iTunes or iCloud, then all you have to do is set the new phone up with your Apple ID, and you can restore all your old stuff easily.

Similar Posts

  • Last Week to Grab CS5.5 With Free Upgrade

    Adobe CS6 is coming out soon, but you don’t have to wait if you need an upgrade now. If you purchase a Creative Suite 5.5 full license or upgrade by May 6th, 2012, you’ll receive an upgrade to CS6 free.

    (This is the way ALL upgrades should be–don’t get punished for buying something a few weeks before a new version comes out!)

    When you register your version of CS5.5, the license for CS6 will be provided to you when available.

    “*View all Adobe CS products here.*”:http://www.smalldog.com/search?x=0&y=0&search=adobe+cs5.5
    “*Read more here.*”:http://blog.smalldog.com/article/buy-adobe-cs55-get-adobe-cs6-free/

  • MAC TREAT #179 (Update and Feedback)

    Last week, I wrote about deleting unwanted email addresses from Apple Mail–totally helpful if you find yourself clicking through defunct autofill suggestions constantly. I heard back from a number of you, and I wanted to pass along some further info to help with the deletion process.

    * One thing to note is that some email addresses will register with the “Remove from Previous Recipients” command, while others will only show “Remove Address” when you go to click on them. This depends on whether or not the recipient is in your Address Book. If he/she is not, “Remove from Previous Recipients” will show (along with the option “Add to Address Book”); if he/she is in your Address Book, only “Remove Address” will show and the option “Show Contact Card” will appear.

    * If you’d like to see everyone that you’ve ever sent an email to, select Window from the Menu Bar in Mail and click “Previous Recipients” there. It will bring up a new window where you can scroll through and edit.

    * Finally, this does not work in any version of the iOS, to my knowledge. So, one thing to try is to manage your addresses in Apple Mail on your Mac and then see if the edits/omissions carry over to your devices. *If you try this, let me know!*

  • SPECIAL: PDO'd

    Need some gadgets for your iPhone or iPod?

    The PDO CarFM is one of our best-selling auto accessories because of its all-in-one design. This week, *save $20* on it–$39.99–exclusively for Kibbles & Bytes readers.

    The UNO Mobile Power Pack is a portable external iPhone/iPod battery pack designed for road warriors, and includes an integrated cable so you can recharge from your laptop or any USB power source. This week, *save $10* for the low price of $14.99!

  • MailTags 3, Part II

    Last week, I wrote about my romance with MailTags 3. Since then, I’ve been slowly convincing my workmates to download the free trial. It was through this that I found the coolest thing about MailTags.

    Because you can set specific MailTags for a sent message, you can see all of the tags come back to you when the person replies. So if I send the email to Joe who doesn’t have MailTags and he responds, his response has my MailTags already set. But here’s what’s even cooler: If you send the message to someone who __does__ have MailTags 3 installed, they see all of the same tags!

    As I mentioned last week, MailTags 3 has a much improved interface over MailTags 2 and I didn’t realize how nice it was until I used it straight for over a week. What I also found incredibly helpful was that I can tag multiple email messages. This made tagging groups of email super easy.

    For example, I receive emails with receipts attached that I want to go through and add to an Excel spreadsheet, but I want to save them up and do them all at once at the end of the week. So, as they start to pile up, I select a bunch at once using Command-click and then just click Tag Messages. I can set a “tickle date” for Friday, and using Smart Mailboxes, I can create a wealth of search criteria based on the tags.

    In Lion Mail, there is a Favorites bar, which I didn’t realize. Just drag your most often-used Smart Mailbox for easy access to it!

    And lastly, if you are a fan of creating rules in Mail, MailTags is fully integrated into Mail’s rule engine. I created a rule “Radio tag” where IF the sender is a member of my AddressBook group “Radio,” then I can set my keyword to __radio.__ This way, all of my mail is marked with one tag without my having to do anything. I believe that this is how MS Entourage (and now MS Outlook) deals with marking messages with Projects or Groups. This was one aspect of Entourage that I really missed when I moved to Mail.

    There are other features that I probably won’t use, however, such as integration with OmniFocus* or Things, but for what I need, MailTags does fabulously.

    As a reminder, MailTags 3 is on sale through the end of April for an introductory price of $19.95. They also have a demo so that you can try the product for 10 days (which was enough to get me hooked).

    “*Click here to go to Indev.ca.*”:http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html

    __*Editor’s Note: We’ll have a review of OmniFocus in an upcoming issue; it’s an incredibly powerful application, and now has an added bonus of compatibility with MailTags! -KH__

  • Can you believe that May is right around the corner? Mother’s Day is coming up, and we’ll have some great ideas for your moms in the next few issues.

    Don’s back next week, so we’ll see you then. Thanks for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!

    _Kali, Dawn & Glenn_

  • SPECIAL: Free Photoshop (Upgrade)!

    *Save $20* on the 27-inch iMac plus Photoshop! Purchase this bundle with Photoshop v.12 and you’ll be eligible for the Photoshop v.13 upgrade when it starts shipping on May 7th.