I was looking around on Facebook before when I saw yet another person who had lost their contacts/numbers due to a fault in their phone, and was requesting everyone send them theirs... This seems to happen fairly often now, including to yours truly, but this sort of thing never used to happen once upon a time when you saved numbers to your sim card. Even if your phone was water damaged, you could still save your numbers by simply putting your simcard into a new phone.

If I remember correctly, you can't save multiple entries to a single name when saving to a simcard, you can only save a name/number. If this is the case, (unless there are new upgraded simcards out there?) then I was thinking perhaps phone manufacturers could include separate memory purely for contacts? Or even designate some of the pre-existing memory for contacts, so that if the phone operating system dies, or something else happens to it, the phone itself can be worked on/formatted and your contacts are still saved. I'm assuming people use a memory card of some sort for backing up most data like photos and documents, but this would be a convenient fix for something that can really piss people off, especially if they don't know how to sync their phone up with a computer (or don't have access to one).

So what do you think?

Nothing Ever Really Dies.....

A dead phone is never completley dead until it's incinerated. It may not power up, but that don't mean it's dead.....

There are courses in retrieving data from 'phones. I sold an old SP5 via ebay to a guy that teaches one. He sent me his courseware after I enquired ( and sent him another phone as well as an NDA. ) and it was a very interesting read. What you propose is actually kinda possible already - it's just time and effort to do so and it's mainly the police that want to. Most Nokias can be accessed at a low level using a data cable and the right tools even after water damage / bad flashing / cars running over them etc You may need to solder contacts onto boards near the flash etc but it's still possible until the chip is actually destroyed.

A removable memory for contacts would be fiddly and add to the cost of the handset. And I doubt it would get used. Assigning space on the exisitng memory card would be a great idea but what happens if during said phone-destroying incident it pops out? Or it becomes corrupt etc etc..

Best to set default contact memory to the simcard if you can.

Recent sims here in the UK can store something like 500 name/number contacts. I doubt it will be long before they become more complex. The sim technology itself is rather ancient. I have 2 sims cloned onto a 'gold' sim card and they can share the number addresses so that might be worth looking into as well. It holds a lot more contacts but doesn't work with many handsets although there is support for switching lines without rebooting the phone which is nice.

Alternatively Orange and Carphone Warehouse shops will back up contact details for you depending on make / model ( orange for free onto your 'spare' sim you get for being a premier customer that also doubles as a discount card and CPW if you buy a 'blank' sim) or you could buy a sim backup mate type thing that just reads contacts.

o2 UK are or at least were working on something similar to the old orange backup: http://www.modaco.com/content/pocket-pc-ge...-backup-restor/ for all types of handset implemented over J2ME. I don't know how far they got with that or what happened to it as I don't work there anymore...

M.S

We are in the WinMo forums, right? Whatever happened to Outlook ActiveSync/Exchange? If someone doesn't even know how to sync the address book to the computer, then it's unlikely that they would know how to set it to save to SIM instead of the phone?

Almost all phones come with a data cable nowadays, sync up to your PC people!

Cable? What's wrong with OTA synching?

No good for dump phones ;p

when I flashed my i900, and then sync with AC4.5 it never replaced my outlook contacts.... where did it save them too??? anyways..... good point...... wondering if I can clone my old sim into a new sim with the 500 names thing..... but will miss having there details (email/Bday/address etc)

Are your comtacts on your PC? If so are they selected for synching?

bugger me, i just tried it again for shits and giggles and it worked....... hmmmm.......
Maybe had something to do with different profile i set up after i reinstalled AC4.5

I'd rather not if you don't mind. But thanks for the offer....



Glad you got it sorted

There are many 3rd party services out there now, which you can sync your contacts/sms etc to. They will keep contacts intact, so emails, birthdays, contact photo, address etc etc will all remain.

I have used Dashwire http://www.dashwire.com
and am currently using vufone http://www.vufone.com

I prefer vufone, and managed to get a 12 month subscription at the end of Feb free as they had a special offer on.

I had a dodgy touch pro, which would lock up, and then fail to boot after a soft reset, resulting in a hard reset, and loss of all data.
Dashwire worked perfectly with syncing contacts back to the phone, but I could not get SMS messages back.
Vufone works perfectly with both. Couple with all my emails being stored on my webserver and 2nd account being Gmail, I use IMAP services for both so have all emails available in the event of a crash / loss of phone etc etc.

I am looking forward to Microsoft's upcoming "myphone" and am hopefull to be able to beta test it soon.

I believe these are better options than storing to sim card, as if you lose your phone, you lose the contacts aswell.

Activesync is the other option, and works well. I use this as a 3rd backup so everything is kept safe.
I used an app sometime ago which would backup SMS messages aswell via Activesync, but am not currently using this.

mine always can't connect with pc

dashwire only supports downloading ur contacts back to ur phone, msgs and pics -for instance- dont so i wouldnt really recommend using it, even updated contacts dont get backed up only new ones are backed up. so all in all when i lost my suff once (firmware update) i could only get my contacts back.

Mine can connect with PC. Save the contacts on Sim card and do backup on PC at regular intervals. So even your phone crashed, you can still have your contacts number.