Saturday, December 27, 2008

How to export GMail Contact Phone Numbers to T-Mobile Contacts

On my first try, exporting my contacts as csv or vcf to the T-Mobile Contacts didn't quite work. It imported the names, home numbers, and home emails. After mucking with the VCF file some and reading the VCF standard for telephone numbers, I was able to get it to work.
This is how to do it properly:
  1. In GMail, go to the Contacts link on the left, then the Export link on the upper right of the box.
  2. Export a group of contacts (I made a new group for my wife's contacts) as the vCard format (this is a .vcf file).
  3. Open the .vcf file in an editor.
  4. Replace TYPE=CELL with TYPE=cell,pref,voice,home on all Cell numbers. This allowed T-Mobile to parse the numbers as "Personal Mobile" numbers
  5. Replace EMAIL;TYPE=INTERNET with EMAIL;TYPE=INTERNET;TYPE=HOME for all home emails, to T-Mobile would parse them as "Personal Emails".
  6. Save the .vcf file
  7. In my.T-Mobile.com, choose Contacts, then Import contacts from another address book
  8. On the next page ("Get Contacts from Other Address Books"), choose "VCF File" and then Browse to find your .vcf file you edited.
  9. Click "Upload and Preview", glance over the data to make sure it all looks good, then click "Add selected contacts to my address book".
  10. On the phone, I went to Settings > Synchronization > Sync Now, although I'm sure if I waited it would have worked.

This is on my wife's Samsung T-339. On my new Android phone, I didn't need to do anything except add phone numbers I hadn't copied into my GMail contacts. It just worked and I had my GMail address book including phone numbers auto-magically within 5 minutes of powering the phone on for the first time. More impressive, this was about 2 days before I actually signed up for phone service.