I switched to the superb Android platform a couple of years ago, and within days, it was evident that there would be no going back to the “Nokia” days.  However, the wife’s phone was still a Nokia.  And, it was getting increasingly frustrating to work with.  Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she agreed to make the switch.

I spent a good part of Sunday moving all her critical information from her old Nokia to the new Android phone.  While Nokia makes it a breeze to switch phones from one of their models to another, try doing it across platforms and you’ll soon be tearing your hair out!  Short story – Nokia doesn’t play nice with anything else.

So, here’s how you can get rid of your Nokia phone and move to a nice Android smartphone…

Before we get started, make sure you have a Windows PC (yes, Nokia still doesn’t support Mac OS X!!!) with the latest copy of the infamous Ovi suite installed.  You can download it for free from the Nokia site.  You will also need Outlook installed on your PC, to make it easier to send your info to Gmail’s services.

If you’re moving to Android, I also suggest you set up a new Gmail account only to use with your phone for the purpose of Contacts and Calendar sync.  That way, your phonebook will not get cluttered with the thousands of email ids already stored as contacts in your primary gmail account.

Once you’ve got the Ovi suite up and running, do the following:

– Connect your Nokia handset to your PC, using a USB cable, and Backup your phone!
– Go to Sync settings and enable Sync with Outlook for Calendar, Contacts and Tasks
– Enable sync for Messages if you’re keen on also getting your messages off your phone
– Now, run the Sync operation till complete
– Disconnect phone and exit Ovi
– Launch Outlook to ensure that Calendar/Contacts/Tasks are all in
– In Outlook, File/Import Export and export these to DOS comma separated files (CSV)
– Launch your newly-setup Gmail account, go to Settings and import Contacts from the CSV file
– Launch said account’s Calendar, go to Settings and import Calendar entries from the CSV file
– If you want to set up Tasks in Gmail too, you may have to add each task manually

(If you have a lot of recurring events or complex entries in your Calendar, you may have to run a sanity check on Google Calendar to ensure the recurrence and notifications are as intended.  Also, if you do setup Tasks in your Google account, you can use the GTask app to sync those with your phone.)

Now, you’re all set to import all this information to your handset.  Start your new Android phone (with wifi on or an active net connection), setup your newly-created Gmail account as the base/default account, and the phone will automatically sync your Contacts and Calendar to your phone!

The best part of this setup is that, once this is done, all new Contact/Calendar entries created using your phone in the said Gmail account will autosync to the cloud, eliminating the need for backups altogether!

If you’d like to export your Messages to the new phone as well, you can try using a combination of Nokia2AndroidSMS (PC) and SMSBackup and Restore (Android), but for some reason, that didn’t work for me.  If all you want to do it save those Inbox messages in an accessible format, just in case you need some of that info, you can instead download NBUExplorer from SourceForge, and point it to your full-backup Nokia file, from which you can access all your messages.

If you use Notes actively, and would like to move that to the cloud as well, look no further than SimpleNote.  The web service works with just about anything, including MNotes on Android and JustNotes on Mac.  You’ll just have to add your old Notes, one by one, to get started.

So, that takes care of all your Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and Notes.

Bye bye data backups.  Bye bye Nokia…

Read Also: Moving to Android: Essential Guide