Transfer your contacts from BlackBerry to iPhone or Android

As iPhones and Android phones get more powerful and gain more enterprise support, many folks are leaving the rounded realm of BlackBerry for the two big touchscreens. Most BlackBerry owners have built up an extensive list of contacts from their many, many texts and emails, and might wonder how they’ll survive the trip. But take heart: you don’t need to pull out your SIM card and pray, or load cumbersome transfer software. In fact, you’re one text message away from transferring your contacts to nearly any smartphone.

BlackBerry offers desktop syncing software, imaginatively titled BlackBerry Desktop Manager, that can import your calendar and contacts into Microsoft Outlook, Windows Calendar, LotusNotes, and a few other organizer apps. If you’re planning to sync your new iPhone or Android with Outlook or another one of those apps, you might do well to go ahead and bring them onto your PC or Mac, load them into Outlook or the like, then rely on that app to pass them on to your next phone.

But then again, the company with the most server space in the world wants to help you instantly synchronize your contacts from one phone to another, so why not let them? Google’s Sync app and service works with BlackBerry phones, along with iPhones, Nokia phones, older Windows Mobile (6.0 and 6.5) models, and any phone that supports SyncML. Android phones have built-in Google account syncing, including contacts, and most any modern smartphone worth its salt (including WebOS and Windows Phone 7) offers some kind of Google/Gmail contact syncing. Worse comes to worse, Google lets you export your contacts in the generally friendly CSV and vCard formats.

So let’s get started. Open your BlackBerry browser and head to m.google.com/sync. You’ll be prompted to download the app Google made just for BlackBerry phones. Alternately, use your desktop browser to open google.com/mobile/sync, then click the “Download app” link under the BlackBerry heading, where you can enter your mobile number to have a direct link sent by SMS to your phone.