Easily Export your Nokia Contacts to another Phone

The address book of your Nokia phone is stored in the online Ovi Contacts – just like Android phones use Google Contacts – but with one big limitation.

Ovi, until now, offered no export feature so there was no easy way to download your phone’s address book from the web to the computer unless you had a Nokia device at hand. The Ovi Suite, Nokia’s desktop synchronization software, didn’t have an export option for Contacts either so your phone contacts were sort-of locked in Nokia’s cloud.

Shubha earlier wrote:

I was using a Nokia E-72 and the data was backed up on Ovi.com, so it’s online and not on my laptop. I am now using an iPhone and would like to sync my contacts but how shall I do that? The original Nokia phone was unfortunately stolen.

Well there’s an easy solution now.

Nokia is discontinuing the Ovi Contacts website (the service will stay but you won’t be able to access your address book from the web browser) and this could be a blessing in disguise for people like Shubha who have moved from Nokia to other platforms.

Nokia has set up a microsite - exportcontacts.ovi.com – where you can download your entire Ovi address book in the popular CSV format with a click. You don’t need the Nokia device or the Ovi desktop suite to export your contacts. The CSV file can can then be imported into Google Contacts and it will intelligently merge the duplicate contacts.

You got to do this soon as, according to an email from Nokia, the web access to Ovi Contacts will be disable after January 24, 2012.

Related: Transfer Contacts from One Phone to Another

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Windows Phone Marketplace Passes 50,000 Apps

It seems like only yesterday that the Windows Phone Marketplace hit 40,000 apps — actually, it was Nov. 17 — and now Microsoft’s mobile app store has just passed 50,000, according to All About Windows Phone.

Microsoft currently gives an official count of “more than 35,000? apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace, a company spokesperson told Mashable. In the past, Microsoft has said that it doesn’t count extremely simple apps such as wallpapers or multiple versions (i.e. a paid game that also provides a “lite” version) as individual apps, which may explain the large discrepancy between the official number and the estimate.

In either case, it’s a fraction of the number of apps in Apple’s App Store or the Android Market (about 600,000 and 500,000 apps, respectively). However, even though the number isn’t large by app-store standards, the Windows Phone Marketplace is growing rapidly. The platform hit 50,000 apps sooner than all platforms except iOS, in just 14 months, the report notes. It took Android 19 months to reach that mark.

Microsoft’s app store passed the milestone sooner than the site predicted, and it’s seen a strong uptick in the number of apps submitted and approved in the past few weeks. The number of apps is growing at a rate of 265 items per day (see the graph below).

All About Windows Phone chalks up the platform’s growth spurt to the increased availability of Windows Phones (the number of countries recently went up from 16 to 35) and the highly anticipated release of Nokia’s Windows Phones, such as the Lumina 710 in the U.S. However, those events had been anticipated for a while, and it doesn’t fully explain the sudden interest from developers, which isn’t directly related to the spread of the platform.

It’s possible the release of the developer preview of Windows 8 may have been a factor. Since both Windows Phone and Windows 8 share the Metro user interface, more than a few Windows 8 developers who had never created apps in Metro may have been persuaded to give Windows Phone a try.

Even though the Windows Phone Marketplace is taking off, Microsoft faces many challenges before its mobile platform will seriously challenge Apple’s or Google’s. Charlie Kindel, the former general manager of Windows Phone’s developer experience, theorizes that Microsoft doesn’t curry favor among carriers and manufacturers the same way Apple and Android have, and the whole platform suffers, even though, as Kindel says, it provides a superior experience in many ways.

At least developers seem to be finally warming up to the platform. Are you a Windows Phone developer or customer? Why do you favor it? And if you’re not a fan, why not? Let us know in the comments.