Sync your contacts between your Mac and LG phone

So I broke down and braved the iPhone 3GS line at Apple San Francisco after work yesterday. Once I got my shiny new 16GB phone home, I began the time-consuming process of setting it up to make me feel warm fuzzies. This setup included attempts to transfer the numbers in my contacts from my old LG-VX8350 phone to the shiny iPhone. Ramon at Apple told me just to connect via bluetooth, then use iSync. Ok, easy enough. Wait, no.

It turns out that virtually none of the LG phones are supported in iSync. So I ended up using an application called BitPim to pull the contacts, then I imported them into my Mac’s address book. When I plugged the iPhone into the laptop, they all were magically synced. Cool.

So the more detailed steps are as follows:

• Download BitPim and drag it into the application folder.
• Turn on laptop bluetooth (strange icon on apple bar next to the wireless icon).
• On the VX8350, go to Menu -> Settings & Tools -> Bluetooth Menu and turn on the bluetooth
• Go through steps on laptop and phone to get the two connected.
• Open BitPim; have the phone auto-recognized.
• Click the Cellphone-with-arrow-to-the-right icon in BitPim to load the phone’s phonebook data.
• Wait
• Eat some oatmeal
• Wait
• Select the contact names I want to keep and click the File -> Export -> vCards… menu item.
• In the save dialog, I selected ‘Apple’ in the ‘dialect’ list box and saved my new vcard with LG contacts
• Ate more oatmeal
• Open Address Book application and import my new vCard
• Plugged in iPhone

I hope this helps someone avoid entering them by hand.