Had my iphone for a year or so. It has a fairly extension phone book. Don't care about the photos or apps, but I want to preserve my contacts. Are those data already stored on my SIM card? Or do I have to save all that to my SIM card? And if so, how do I do that?
iPhone 3GS, iOS 5.1.1
Well, I haven't selected a new phone yet. Just know that I want to get off the iPhone. Probably just going to go back to a simple flip with a real "keyboard."
No data is stored on the sim card. Your contacts should be sync to iTunes with whatever program you choose.
Ok, but the phone I am replacing it with is not an apple product. How do I get my contacts off the iphone onto a new phone?
You will need to sync all of the contact data to a supported application on the computer or to a cloud service, such as Gmail. After that, you will be able to sync them to the new device, or download from the cloud. Find out what the new device will support before doing this.
Wow, if only for the good old days when this stuff was easy - wish I even understood the language you were speaking! LoL
I'll try and explain it a little easier if you like. As you were told by razmee209, the iPhone does not store any contact data on the SIM card as other phones use to. This is by design. Contacts are saved in the Contact application on the phone, and can be synced to Address book, or Windows Contacts, or Outlook on the computer. That allows for changes to be made either on the phone or the computer and then synced so both devices have the same information. A newer service is iCloud for Apple, but moving to a non-iOS device limits what you can do. If the new phone supports syncing with the computer and the applications I mentioned above, then no problem. If not, then you need to know what it supports so you can tell how to transfer them. If it will accept a cloud service, one choice is Gmail, which will support downloading your contacts to them, and then transferring to the new device if it supports it. Good luck.
It's not too hard. Who's your email provider and what's your new phone?
Thanks Chris. Appreciate the time in you laying that out.
Ask the carrier you get your new phone from if they will transfer the contacts for you.
Ok done. Now, I've hooked up my iPhone to my iMac and opened iTunes. I want to transfer everything on my iPhone to iTunes. Doesn't seem to give me a way to do that. How, for example, do I pull the 200+ songs from my iPhone into iTunes?
Geez, for an Apple product this is so UNintuitive.
The phone is not designed to move data from the phone to iTunes. The music library is supposed to already be in iTunes. You will need to have your iTunes library from where ever you obtained the music at and back it up and move it to this different computer. There is a method of moving that, check the search box here and you can find a support document that lets you know how to move your library.
Depends on where you got your music from. How did it get on there?
You can transfer all iTunes purchased media via File > Transfer purchases in iTunes on your computer.
Yep, I was able to figure out the purchase transfer. But only a very small portion of the tunes I had on my iphone were purchased. Most were imported from CD into iTunes on a PC, and then downloaded to the device. I just assumed the iphone data storage was just like any other storage device and you could move things on and off just like a hard drive, thumb drive, etc. I was hoping not to have to gather up the dozens of CDs and re-import everything, then recreate all the playlists. I guess I'll have to start from scratch. Thanks Apple!
Anyway, thanks guys for your help.
Is my iphone data stored on the SIM card?
