I recently went through the agony of switching phones from a Nokia N95 8GB Symbian offering to a HTC Hero running Android. For those unfamiliar with how much of a chore it is to set up a new phone, let me enlighten you.
Naively, I attempted to simply stick my old SIM card into my new phone, expecting it to fire up and start working seamlessly straight away. Needless to say, it didn’t.
I quickly discovered that none of my contacts were even saved to my SIM, except for those that my carrier, 3 Australia, had somehow deemed important enough. Shouldn’t that be mandatory? I asked myself. Shouldn’t I be able to save a contact to my phone and have it saved instantly to my SIM rather than have my phone decide “nah, I’m not going to bother doing that for you.”
After all, it’s hardly as if a SIM card can’t handle the miniscule amount of data required. It only takes 256k to hold up to 500 contacts, and most people don’t even have half that number of contacts on their cell phones.
Still, no use crying over spilled SIM contacts, so my natural next step was to attempt to find some way to export all my contact data in some way, shape or form to my new device.
I resorted to using Nokia’s PC Suite, exporting all my saved contact data, including numbers, email addresses, home addresses, birthdays, anniversaries and more into a .CSV file.
So far, so good. I then imported the .CSV file into my Gmail contact list and to my heart’s fluttering delight, saw all my contacts’ names show up. Progress!
Encouraged, I moved on to the next step of my mobile mission, to sync all my now Gmail-ified contacts to my new phone. It seemed to work without a hitch, which left me light headed with giddy excitement. Surely it couldn’t be that easy could it?
I was right, it surely could not.
About an hour later I went to send an SMS to one of my contacts, only to discover to my immense frustration that while the data had indeed been saved in the export, all the phone numbers, email addresses etc, had only been transferred as a note attached to each contact name, rendering it practically useless.
As I sat there realizing I’d have to go through every single saved contact and enter all the data in by hand, I found myself more than ready to have a frank ‘discussion’ with whoever had the bright idea to stop saving contact data to one’s SIM.
A good half hour later, after manually plugging in 100+ contacts, I was even more in need of a beer – although as an Aussie, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t always ready for one of those amber necked beauties – and a punching bag.
Shouldn’t there be a standards body out there mandating that there be an easy way to move data from one device to another? Why should consumers be penalized for buying new devices? Isn’t it counter-productive to the economy to cripple consumers and trip them at every hurdle?
And while we’re on the subject, why don’t all phone carriers provide cloud back up for phone data, or at a very minimum, contact data, as a complimentary service. Lord knows most of us pay enough in our monthly contracts anyway.
It’s a consumer’s right to switch phones and switch operating systems. In this day and age it happens all the time. So, why does the industry continue on in such a infantile fashion, refusing to work with one another to make consumer experience better? If anyone has the answer, please let me know.
You can read more ranting from Chris on his blog Ctrlrefresh
