M.N. Rao is looking for an easy workaround to copy contacts from his old Nokia phone to an iPhone. He writes from Bangalore:

Till now, I was using a humble Nokia Classic but have recently got an iPhone 4S. The big problem is that I don’t understand how to transfer my existing contacts stored in Nokia to the new iPhone. Would you guide me?

If it were a S60 Nokia phone (like the E-Series), you could have probably used Google Mobile Sync to copy contacts from the phone to Google Contacts and then use Google Sync on the iPhone again to bring those contacts from the cloud into your phone’s address book.

Transfer Contacts from Nokia Phone to iPhone

For older phones, you may use the operator’s SIM to transfer contacts from one phone to another. While the SIM is still inside your Nokia phone, go to Contacts – > Options – > Mark / Unmark – > Mark All. Now that all your existing contacts are selected, go to Options – > Copy – > Copy contacts to and choose SIM memory.

Next insert the SIM card into your iPhone and, as shown in the above screenshots, go to Settings – > Mail, Contacts, Calendars and tap the Import SIM contacts button. Then configure the iPhone with your Gmail account and use Google Contacts to eliminate or merge duplicates, if any, from the iPhone.

The Nokia phone accepts regular SIM cards while the iPhone would only accept micro-SIM cards. If you have already cut the original SIM to fit into the iPhone, ask the mobile shop for Micro SIM adapters. The limitation is that your SIM may not have enough storage for all phone numbers so you may have to do the transfer in batches.

Shubha Verma had a related problem. She was using a Nokia E-72 and all the contacts data was synchronized with Ovi.com. When her Nokia phone was stolen, she switched to an iPhone but couldn’t import her Nokia address book into the iPhone because Nokia Ovi, for some unknown reasons, doesn’t offer an export option for contacts.

Related: Transfer Contacts from One Phone to Another