Android App Review: UiA Backup Contacts

Well, I finally got to the point where I couldn’t stand AT&Ts lack of reception in buildings and the Backflip so I just changed to Virgin Mobile’s Samsung Intercept.  In GSM land my contacts were saved on the SIM.  Now that I’m back in CDMA land there is no SIM.  To add insult to injury apparently Motorola’s Motoblur saved all my contacts to their system instead of Google so adding my google account didn’t bring over all my contacts.

I decided to head to the Android Market to search for a solution.  It seemed like the best, although not as straight forward as I’d like, solution was UiA Backup Contacts.  This involved saving the contacts as a .CSV file on my Backflip and then importing that CSV file into either Outlook or Google.  Since my corporate e-mail has never worked with any phone I’ve ever had and I don’t really want my business contacts on my personal phone I decided to use the Google option.  Backup Contacts allows you to choose the format that is appropriate between Google, Outlook, or Custom (i guess for the handful of Groupwise and Lotus Notes users out there or people who just want certain fields).

The application will e-mail the CSV file or upload it to a dropbox.  I didn’t use either of those features, I just put my microSD card in my computer and imported everything to google.

The biggest complaint with this app is that it doesn’t restore contacts so I couldn’t just put this application on my new Intercept and just directly take the contacts phone to phone.  I didn’t necessarily need my contacts transferred to Google, but in the long run if I get another android phone all I need to do is add my google account now that all my contacts are saving to Google instead of Motoblur or anything else.