Cell phone - address book and SIM cards

[LaurenB]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 10:59am

When you add your address book to your cell phone, is there a preferable place to add it --- to the phone storage, or the SIM card?

[orangeskittles]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 11:46am

SIM card. If you need to replace your phone, the same SIM card goes into the new phone, with all your information stored on it.

[LaurenB]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 12:10pm

Thanks, sounds like a good answer. Wish I had known before I added the entire address book, as all the entries were added to the phone memory. I actually tried to figure out where the entries were stored, and my phone doesn't really tell me. The only reason I think it's not on the SIM card is because I saw a command for SIM Capacity, and it said it was empty.

I can see there is a command where I can copy the entire address book to the SIM card. Does anyone know if that will result in duplicate entries when I scroll through the address book? Sheesh, I wish this would have been documented in the user manual.

[latitudex1]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 1:59pm

Eh, it doesn't really matter where you save contacts on your phone. Almost all of the GSM phones I've come across have had some kind of "Transfer to SIM" type of function anyways. And I know that in my own GSM phone experience, it takes longer to save contacts to a SIM card versus saving them on the phone's memory anyway. And only names and numbers can be stored on the SIM card. I mean, your contacts save to the phone's memory by default for a reason.

Hell, if you have a smartphone (iPhone, Symbian, Windows, Android, Blackberry, etc.), it reallY doesn't matter. It's super duper easy to transfer contacts out of any smartphone device.

And, BTW, you will likely have duplicate entries if you decide to copy over now (don't bother), but every phone handles contacts differently. That part was misinformed. Your SIM contacts will probably be in a whole 'nother section of your phone's contacts screen. And I do fully advocate backing up your contacts to your SIM card regularly. You never know what could happen to your phone, but as long as you have your SIM card...

And if you plan on swapping phones constantly, disregard my advice and go for what orangeskittles said. You'll need to save every contact you make to your SIM card in that kind of situation.
Updated On: 2/27/10 at 01:59 PM

[LaurenB]

Posted: 2/27/10 at 3:25pm

Thanks for the feedback.