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E51: switching between two different sets of Contacts

1 replies · 4,444 views · Started 28 October 2008

Hi,

I just got a Nokia e51, and it's my first phone with Symbian OS. It seems really nice, but I'm finding one big problem: it seems impossible to set contacts from a SIM card to be primary source of contacts, it insists on copying all of contacts from the SIM card to the "Contacts" folder in phone memory.

I find this immensely frustrating. I have two SIM cards from two different countries, and I absolutely do not want to copy all contacts from both SIM cards into one (phone) memory on "Contacts" folder. I know how trivial this sounds, but I have been very adamant over the years to keep all my contacts and phone numbers separately on SIM cards, and absolutely none in phone memory, and it's fairly important to me.

What are my options? Right now I can only think of the following:

-Each time I take SIM card 1 out of the phone, I delete all existing contacts (is this easily done?)
-And then when I put SIM card 2, I copy THOSE contacts to the phone, where they're gonna sit until I switch the SIM cards again and delete all of them from phone memory

However, I'm afraid that I may lose contacts I put in in the meantime. Once you add a new contact to a phone memory, is it automatically copied to SIM card as well? If not, I would virtually have to keep 2 separate backups on my PC everytime I change SIM cards, right?

Please advise. I am certain that there is stuff in Symbian to cater for these needs, but I'm probably not aware of it.

Cheers

I don't really understand why you need them kept apart, which makes it hard to suggest a solution. I don't know a solution for the way you are currently working.

What are you trying to achieve though?

Do the contacts HAVE to stay on the SIM cards, or can they be stored elsewhere if they are kept apart? For instance you could keep the contacts in HTML files (use hyperlinks like this: "tel://01234987654" without the quotes). You can hide the files on the interweb, or store them on the device itself.

What about things like your call history, does that matter?