How to import a telephone list from your PC/laptop to a Sony Ericsson W810i cellphone

I bought this Sony Ericsson phone from Cingular after getting tired of the high over usage charges from Verizon. The rollover minutes and the fact that Cingular are the sole-distributors of the up and coming iPhone did the trick.

When I got the W810i, i was very impressed by the quality of the display and the intuitive menu interface.

I decided to write this piece to help others who have purchased this phone to import their tel. numbers. Although, they provide you with some good software tools to do the job, there are no specific instructions on how to import your tel. nos. I am guessing many people like me would want to do this and have their cell phone numbers backed up on their PC or notebook.

Setting up your original list. First of all you will need to have your telephone list in a format that can be read by the W810i. You may have your tel. number list in text format or some other applications. Providing you can extract your tel. list in csv (comma separated variable) then everything is smooth sailing. Please look to your applications to do this, most applications will allow you to export your numbers to a list in this format (if they dont, the application sucks, in my opinion :-)

Importing to your W810i To import into your W810i, the only solution i found was to first export your tel. list into outlook express and then import through the provided Sony CD application into the W810i. If your list is already in express then you are good to go. However, there are several nuances that you need to be aware of.

I first of all imported by csv list into outlook express and then checke the address book in outlook express to see if the list was there. Low and behold the import function in Outlook express does work! I was able to see the addresses by opening the express Address book.

I then attempted to use the sync. application (Sony CD application) to sync. the W810i with the Outlook express. On my first attempt, I found the list did import into the W810i, but all the names appeared as Name with the tel. nos. This meant that none of the names were imported, which was totally useless to me! I then checked why the name was not importing and played around with the outlook express address book. I finally discovered that the name that W810i uses as a field does not correspond to the name that outlook express uses! However, the nickname is field that needs to be populated in the address book of outlook in order for the W810i to recognize the name. However, i had no intention of inputting the nickname by hand one by one, so I devised another strategy. I took my original csv list and imported into excel and added another column and called this 'nickname'. I then turned this file back into csv and imported into outlook express and then sync. with the W810i and bravo all the names were now correctly imported along with the tel. nos! You will also note that you can import emails and other fields providing you match up the correct fields with that of W810i.

In summary, I was able to import all my contact details into my W810i with some simple manipulation of the csv list and the outlook form fields.

If you like more help, you can contact me at fkhaleque@gmail.com.

Here are some useful links;
Sony Ericsson Support for the W810i phone

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