Just got an iPhone SE (“Small Edition”?) running iOS 9. I’m a late adopter… very late, I’ve been using my hardy Blackberry Curve for 5+ years. I still love its battery life, one-thumb navigation button, easy single-hand operation, excellent purseability, and hardiness. It’s amazing for texting and email. But I can’t open about half the webpages I try to load, and nobody’s making – or updating – apps for BlackBerry OS 6. I looked at all the new BlackBerries, but nothing’s as usable as the Curve hardware-wise and the app ecosystem just isn’t there. So, here are my adventures in migrating from very old tech (in cell phone terms) to the current iPhone.
The best way I found to get the address book from the BlackBerry to the iPhone is this ridiculous hack from Dr Smoke at http://thexlab.com/faqs/bb_to_iphone.html :
- Send myself an email with some of my contacts attached as vCards… my email provider just won’t handle 106 attachments!
- Open the email on my mac and save the vCards to a folder.
- Repeat until all contacts emailed and saved.
- Import the vCards into AddressBook.
- Sync AddressBook with iPhone.
It’s worth mentioning that Dr Smoke found a few problems, his solution was to open each vCard in TextEdit, but it’s easier to use grep. The problems are:
- Problem: “\n \n” in notes can make vcard import fail
- Problem: “X-Other” not in expected format
To solve these just grep for “\n” and “Other” and manually correct any vCards with the problem.
MacBook-Air:CONTACTS n_user$ grep "Other" * WIND customer care.vcf:X-Other#:611
To get the rest of my stuff off the Blackberry, I attached it as a USB drive to my Mac and moved everything over. The next problem with that is that everything is in weird BlackBerry-specific file formats.