Moving from phone to phone

As part of leaving the job, I had to give my mobile phone back to the company. It’s quite common to have company mobile phones and subscriptions here in Finland, especially in the IT industry.

I fortunately got a new phone from the current company a few days beforehand, as I needed to sync some data, such as contacts, images and video clips, from the old phone to the new one.

This was not a straightforward task. First, I tried to back up the old phone to PC with Nokia Data Suite and then restore the contents to the new phone. I got the backup, but it can’t be restored to a new phone, only to the old one…

The next option was to use Nokia’s phone-to-phone transfer utility. I first tried, in vain, to open the application on the old phone — my intuition told me that I want to copy data from the old phone to the new phone. I failed. Several times, may I add. The phones communicated ok and the new phone got an application (once again, several times) for the data transfer, but nothing would happen. I restarted phones, installed new software to the old phone, you name it. Nothing helped.

Finally, I tried the same procedure using the new phone. Suddenly, the phones communicated and I could get a list of items to copy. So, Nokia’s logic says that I need to copy to the new phone from the old phone.

Of course, this was not perfect. All messages were not copied. I don’t know why. There were no program to do it on the phones and none of the googling results looked very promising, so I decided to transfer messages using the memory card.

The messages were really easy to move to the memory card. You just changed the message location on the old phone and suddenly there were on the card. On the other hand, things were not that easy on the new phone. Changing the location yielded a big fat zero, and the messages stay put on the memory card. I’m still having them there, using the card as the main storage.

Speaking of the memory card, the phone’s user interface is themeable. The only good looking preinstalled theme resides on the memory card, and if I take the card out, the phone resets back to the default theme. The same goes with the MP3 used as the ringing tone.

Maybe I should install a decent file manager or some sort of S60 system tweaker the move the files to the phone.

I wish that someone would pay more attention to make these phones simple to use. Things should just happen, no tweaks, no installs, no curses. I’m looking for the Apple of mobile phones. Any volunteers?