2 Ways to Never Lose Your Contacts Again!

If you value Nokia’s brand equity and have owned a succession of Nokia phones, you may wonder if there are other ways to backup or synchronize your data apart from using the Nokia PC Suite. If you’re on a Mac, you can use the iSync plugin, but Nokia has introduced two ways to sync data to make switching phones easier.

Phone Switch
Most of the new Nokia phones have this little app under the “Tools” folder. More often ignored, Phone Switch is a brilliant application that allows you to produce a carbon copy of your current Nokia phone with another unit. It goes without saying that both phones need to have ‘Switch’ installed and this should be no problem. When I got my N86 (courtesy of the Ovi by Nokia campaign) I opted to use the Phone Switch app by turning on Bluetooth for both devices and choosing what PIM info I should sync. It allows for the transfer of your contacts, SMS (including folders), MMS, Bookmarks, Landmarks (for maps), Gallery, Notes, Active Notes, and Calendar. Voila! Carbon copy of two Nokia phones!

nota bene: The N86 doesn’t seem to be compatible with Active Notes. There’s a world of difference between the regular stock ‘Notes’ app and the former and it seems that by default, Active Notes comes with all Eseries devices — not sure about the Nseries, but the N86 seems to be left out. Apart from being able to sync to Microsoft Outlook, Active Notes allows you to create and sync HTML note taking unlike the regular Notes app that is in plain text. The discussion thread for the N86 bugs and fixes can be found in the Nokia discussion forums.

OVI Sync Tool
So people have been asking what’s with this OVI thing. Well, this is a partial explanation. So basically, the Finnish engineers (Nokia) got tired of people who kept on texting back “Hus dis” or “Sori I lost my fone, hus dis?” or “My fonebuk got erased so I don’t have ur number.” Ya right, they just deleted you because you’re so annoying.

OVi Sync lets you keep your address book on the Internet forever so that if you lose your Nokia phone, all you need to do is sync the data back via 3G or WiFi. Brilliant, no? You can also sync data between two Nokia phones if you’re in the habit of changing often.

All you need to do is sign up with OVI and go to the Sync toolbar (that’s the one with the contacts list on the leftmost). You will then be able to choose among the list of phones available. You’ll need to enter your phone number to receive an SMS which helps you configure the service. I got to do this in 2 tries.

Before OVI, I used to sync all my data online with Plaxo but when they turned into some weird web 2.0 social network that sort of resembles LinkedIn, I opted out of the service. OVI Sync and Plaxo work similarly but OVI’s sync tool seems to be more efficient as I’ve actually lost contacts from Plaxo’s service before and had to pay to be upgraded to a premium account to fix this. OVI’s Sync is free. Of course you need to have a S60-enabled phone (so yes it also works with some LG and Samsung phones as long as you are running the S60 platform).

Disclosure: As most of you may already know, I’m an ambassador for the OVI by Nokia campaign. I’ve been an OVI subscriber since 2008. Do you? 😛