Help Steps for setting up new phone

[jgirvine]

Getting husband a Optima S on the first of April. I know when I got mine, I got it at the Sprint store and they transferred my contacts into it. Then when I got home they were all gone after I did some setup steps. PAIN

Seems like I read something here on this forum that I need to do something BEFORE the contacts are transferred. Can someone tell me the steps to follow getting this phone new and not have any headaches?

Thanks

 

[RazzMaTazz]

Since the Optimus S is an Android phone, probably the best way to get your contacts onto the phone is to put your contacts in Gmail "Contacts". Any contacts in Gmail will automatically get syncrhonizd with the phone (as long as you enter that Gmail account into the phone).

If, at the Sprint store or Best But or whereever you buy the phone, they transfer your contacts from your old phone to your Optimus S, there is a possibility that you will end up with double-entries for each contact, both on Gmail and on your phone. That happened to me when the geniuses at Best Buy transfered my 1000 contacts. And it caused me to go through and delete 1000 duplicate entries. But it might work fine for you.

Depending on where you currently have your contacts stored, you may want to upload them to Gmail, and just ask the store employee not to bother transferring over your contacts from your old phone.

For example:
1) If you already keep your contacts on Gmail, you don't need to do anythng beacuse they will get synced with your phone.
2) If you keep your contacts on Outlook or Yahoo Mail, you should probably export your contacts as a CSV file, and then go to Gmail and import the CSV file. Gmail has tutorials on how to do this.
3) If you only keep your contacts on your phone, you may want to figure out how to export them to a CSV file (or some other format that Gmail can read) and then import them into Gmail. Or just trust the Sprint employee to transfer them.
4) If you keep your contacts on Outlook that is connected to an Exchange Server (usually in a corporate environment) then your contacts should sync through Exchange (but you may need to contact your IT person).

It's probably worth noting that Android has 2 different contacts folders; one that can get synced with Gmail, and one that is "phone-only" that can't be syced with Gmail. If you really want to keep Google (Gmail) from having access to all of your contacts, there are some options for syncing directly between Outlook on your PC, and your phone through software like MyPhoneExplorer.