My wife and I both got new cell phones, almost on the same day. And this has caused all kinds of issues in the household, primarily divided into two groups of problems: the first, unfamiliarity with the new gizmos, and the second, a determination among various manufacturers to make absolutely certain it ain’t easy to transfer personal information like contact lists.

My old phone was a Sony Ericsson Z520a, a great little phone, but a little constricting when trying to make to-do lists, memos, and the like on-the-road…so I bought an LG Cookie (over on the left) at a great price; it’s a touch-screen phone that accepts java applications (so I’m not locked into someone else’s idea of what I can run on my own phone) and so far I kinda like it…it’s everything a modern phone should be (which tends to mean about everything except a telephone), and even handles importing vCard-format contacts, which I should have been able to get out of my old phone, but for some reason couldn’t. So I wasted a whole lot of time manually sending the contacts one-at-a-time from the SE to the LG via bluetooth. Once on the LG, editing was relatively easy what with the various input methods including phone keypad, QWERTY keyboard, and even handwriting-recognition (although there’s no programmer in the world good enough to program a device to recognize my writing!). Using down-time, I was able to get my contact list looking pretty good.
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