Gents, this is likely going to garner a laugh or three but here goes. I am only now making the jump from feature phones to smartphones though I think it may be smart only in the carrier's world since it will cost us more now. Anyroad, I have been frustrated beyond reason today trying to do something as simple as edit, save, and transfer the contacts in the old phone.
The player; Alcatel 871A. This is a cheap mobile GoPhone I bought at Walmart to replace my ailing handset which was itself a cheap GoPhone replacement for my original contract handset. The Alcatel has/had two features I thought would make such things as I am attempting easier when the time came.Bluetooth and micro SD storage. See there? I was at least trying to think ahead. First up I copied all contacts to the sim card. I wanted to see what I could muss around with by loading the contacts onto the SD card and wanted the SIM backup in case anything went wrong. Wrong, he says? Uh...yeah.
Somehow between copying the contacts back and forth from phone to sim I wound up with over six hundred contacts in all! Oh boy, I knew before I looked that I was going to have multiple copies of contacts and sure enough, both phone and sim had four or five copies of each contact. Oi. In the meantime I had been searching the phone for a way to save the contacts to the SD card. There is no menu option for this but if you go into the phone book and select a contact there is the option to move it to phone, sim, or file. Hmm, says I. This is how you get them to SD card. So I chose a contact(I saw no option for 'all' so felt safe) and sent it to file. Nothing apparently happened. Well bollocks. This was getting frustrating. Alcatel's site is beyond useless for this phone. No documents at all. AT&T had some nice videos and this is where I discovered the proper menu sequences to copy to/from phone and sim. So this is where I got the bright idea of deleting every contact on the phone and then I would go into the ones saved on the sim and delete them line by line. It worked until I realised all I had left were contacts that were in file format. If you click them they open up as something that looks like a text message! For the love of Pete this stuff should not be this hard.
So to it. First, is there a common sense way to move the contacts from my phone or sim card to either the SD card or a pc? It has a micro usb port on it but the connection to the pc only sees things like video, pictures, etc. It does NOT see the micro sd card I installed and thought I was saving all my 'stuff' to. I tried taking the sd card out of the phone and inserting it into a SD card adapter in viewing it in the pc. It does not see it at all. Either through the reader or as before, when attached through a cable and in 'mass storage mode'. AT&T site says it should have shown up as two drives. Phone memory and card memory. I any event, the contacts are not viewable in anything but the phone's screen. Infuriating to say the least. Can someone, anyone suggest a way to fix this unholy mess? Particularly the 'file' issue with the contacts. Thanks and sorry to be so long on this.
The player; Alcatel 871A. This is a cheap mobile GoPhone I bought at Walmart to replace my ailing handset which was itself a cheap GoPhone replacement for my original contract handset. The Alcatel has/had two features I thought would make such things as I am attempting easier when the time came.Bluetooth and micro SD storage. See there? I was at least trying to think ahead. First up I copied all contacts to the sim card. I wanted to see what I could muss around with by loading the contacts onto the SD card and wanted the SIM backup in case anything went wrong. Wrong, he says? Uh...yeah.
Somehow between copying the contacts back and forth from phone to sim I wound up with over six hundred contacts in all! Oh boy, I knew before I looked that I was going to have multiple copies of contacts and sure enough, both phone and sim had four or five copies of each contact. Oi. In the meantime I had been searching the phone for a way to save the contacts to the SD card. There is no menu option for this but if you go into the phone book and select a contact there is the option to move it to phone, sim, or file. Hmm, says I. This is how you get them to SD card. So I chose a contact(I saw no option for 'all' so felt safe) and sent it to file. Nothing apparently happened. Well bollocks. This was getting frustrating. Alcatel's site is beyond useless for this phone. No documents at all. AT&T had some nice videos and this is where I discovered the proper menu sequences to copy to/from phone and sim. So this is where I got the bright idea of deleting every contact on the phone and then I would go into the ones saved on the sim and delete them line by line. It worked until I realised all I had left were contacts that were in file format. If you click them they open up as something that looks like a text message! For the love of Pete this stuff should not be this hard.
So to it. First, is there a common sense way to move the contacts from my phone or sim card to either the SD card or a pc? It has a micro usb port on it but the connection to the pc only sees things like video, pictures, etc. It does NOT see the micro sd card I installed and thought I was saving all my 'stuff' to. I tried taking the sd card out of the phone and inserting it into a SD card adapter in viewing it in the pc. It does not see it at all. Either through the reader or as before, when attached through a cable and in 'mass storage mode'. AT&T site says it should have shown up as two drives. Phone memory and card memory. I any event, the contacts are not viewable in anything but the phone's screen. Infuriating to say the least. Can someone, anyone suggest a way to fix this unholy mess? Particularly the 'file' issue with the contacts. Thanks and sorry to be so long on this.
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