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.