I had some files (the photos in the previous post) that I wanted to transfer from my phone to my PC. One would have thought that in 2018 this would be a simple task...


Bluetooth: nope. Transfers would start, but then fail partway through for no apparent reason.

Direct USB connection: nope. One USB port threw a fit over excessive power draw. The other port worked and the phone appeared in My Computer, but never managed to open the folder with the photos (some driver layer either objected to the number of photos or just took far too long to list them all).

USB memory stick: mostly nope. The photo album has no way to directly send a photo to the memory stick, and while I could have probably found the photo and copied it myself in the file manager it would be hard to find the right photo.

Copy to network share: is that even a thing on Android? Again, suffers from there being no "send to network share" option in the photo album.


Fine, so I'll give up on a local file transfer and pick something cloud-based. Because of course the best way to copy a file between two devices in the same room is to bounce it off a server in America.


Google Keep: nope. The note appeared online but the photo only showed up inside the phone app.

Google Docs: extra special nope. The online view had a partially-uploaded photo.

Email: success! Sigh.


xkcd 949

Every time you email a file to yourself so you can pull it up on your friend's laptop, Tim Berners-Lee sheds a single tear.

So I've been meaning to migrate from the Nokia 6210 Navigator to something that's actually supported these days, and the Gnu has given me his old Galaxy Nexus. Now while there's a collection of apps that I've been using and want to find replacements for, all I really need to be able to use it as a phone is to be able to transfer my contacts across to it. This ought to be easy as everything should support vCard these days, right?

I know better than to try sending the contacts via Bluetooth - last time I attempted that with an Android phone, you had to approve each and every single transfer. That said, that was a few years ago so maybe modern Android will be smarter. Let's have a go...

Nope, it's still unusable. I only had to approve the transfer once, but now I've got the contacts in whatever staging area Bluetooth uses I can only import them one-at-a-time. Which is stupid - the ten-year-old Ericsson T39m I had at university knew how to bulk import contacts over Bluetooth, so why doesn't modern Android?

Let's try the offline way instead...

Step 1: exporting the contacts from the Nokia is trivial. Fire up the PC client, wait until it's found the phone over Bluetooth, select all contacts, hit File, Export, and hey presto I now have a folder full of vCards. Simples! I could even do this entirely on the phone if I wanted.

Step 2: importing the contacts to the Nexus. Plug it in to the PC, drop the folder full of vCards somewhere, fire up the Contacts app on the phone, pick "Import from storage" in the menu, select "Import all vCard files"... and nothing happens. Well, that's not quite right, a "Cannot import vCard" message flashed up for all of a second or two.

Apparently the best way to handle a single bad file is to abort the entire process without telling the user which file was broken. Or giving them any way to skip the broken file and continue with the rest. And yes, I know it's only one (or possibly a few) files, because I can successfully import the contacts one-at-a-time. Presumably what I'm supposed to do is binary chop through the contacts until I find whichever file it doesn't like, which is tedious at best.

It never ceases to amaze me how rubbish modern smartphones are at actually being phones.


Edit: it looks like the import failed because one (just one) vCard contained a line like:

EMAIL;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE;CHARSET=utf-8:nope@nope.invalid=0D=0A
  =0D=0A=0D=0A

So basically if an email address in a single vCard has trailing whitespace (or possibly is encoded, because of course no-one would ever need to do that), Android's contacts app gives up completely. Sigh.


Edit again: ...and the import has blatted any * or # digits in the numbers. Because of course those can't possibly be significant.