Be prepared: transfer your contacts

Make sure you don’t lose a single contact when you switch to your iPhone

One of the critical things you need to do when switching to a new phone is to transfer your contacts and other important settings across to it. The simplest way to do this is by transferring everything from your phone to your computer now, ready for transferring across to your iPhone when it arrives. Consult your phone’s documentation for details of doing so. Look for an option to synchronise your contacts with your computer – if given an option, choose either Microsoft Outlook if it’s installed on your computer or Windows Address Book.

Transfer to iPhone

After you’ve connected your iPhone to your PC and activated it through iTunes, you’ll be able to quickly transfer your contacts back to it. Select your iPhone from the left-hand menu and switch to the Info tab. You’ll see an option marked “Sync contacts with” – tick this, and choose either Outlook or Windows Contacts from the drop-down menu, then click Apply to transfer your contacts back across to your iPhone.

Use your phone SIM

If you’re keeping your old SIM card, and all you want to do is transfer over your contacts, you can simply move them from your phone’s memory to your SIM card. Your phone’s documentation should contain step-by-step instructions for doing so, but the process is broadly similar for all phones: look on your contacts menu for an option to select all your contacts and copy them to the SIM card. If you can’t find any instructions, your phone may already store your contacts on the SIM card. Transferring contacts from your SIM card to your new iPhone is simple once the SIM card has been inserted: just open Settings, select Mail, Contacts, Calendars and scroll down through the list of options until you find a button marked Import SIM Contacts. Just press this to re-import your contacts into your iPhone.