Last week, I upgraded my phone to a Nokia 6230. It's a nice phone -- although I do find a few things with it slightly annoying.

My old phone is a Nokia 6100, and I want to get some content off of it. I'm not worried about Contacts/Calendar -- I used PC Sync to push everything from Outlook to it. Getting Bluetooth working was harder than it should have been -- the Nokia software has some singularly useless error messages.

My problem is this: I want to get my custom ringtone from the old phone to the new phone. John Ripley and I spent most of one afternoon with an iMac, a whiteboard and his phone composing a "Willow the Wisp" ringtone, and I want it back.

I'd also like my custom wallpaper, but this isn't so important -- I have the original photo somewhere.

I've tried Nokia Content Copier, but it won't allow me to copy the data from one phone to the other. If I back up the 6100 (or use the Transfer Data From mode), I get a file on my PC containing the two items I'm bothered about but since it's a monolithic file, there's no way to extract the two files (or is there?).

Trying to copy that content to the other phone has been fraught with difficulty. I'm getting "Backup definition could not be read from the phone. The current task cannot be completed."

Sometimes I'll get further: "These contents have been exported from a different phone model than the currently connected phone. Some of the contents may not be fully imported to the phone."

Then the list of items to copy is blank.

I've tried using the "Nokia Phone Browser", which integrates into the Windows Explorer Shell Namespace, but -- while that displays the files in question -- I'm unable to copy them to the PC. I get a not-particularly-helpful "The operation could not be completed." message.

Help!

Will any of the products by Futuredial do this?

Handset manager for my MA-600 IrDA adaptor claims to do two-way sound transfer, but I can believe it might not work on newer phones... might be worth a try.

I guess John doesn't have the original file kicking about?

Hugo

It's funny you bring this up, because I'm having a similar problem. I just got a new phone (Samsung e105), and I bought the data cable so that I could manage and back up its phone book. The software supplied with the data cable will show the phone numbers on the screen and let me edit them, but when I try to export to CSV, it exports a blank file. I just found it very ironic that the primary purpose of having the data cable and software is the thing that malfunctions. The third-party Futuredial software works, but it only exports the phone book to its own proprietary file format, so I can't do anything useful with the file. Sigh.

If you're connected via bluetooth you should just be able to send the wallpaper file via windows. Works like a charm on my 7650. I never use the Nokia Data Suite, I sporadically back my address book up, but that's simply a case of 'Mark All', 'send via email'. None of this cable bollocks.

I usually do the following:

Make my phone discoverable
Pair it to my laptop
Discover its services
Select File Transfer
Drop the file in the folder
Accept the connection on the phone
Wait for it to download
Appears in my incoming messages list

Via IR is even easier:

Switch my IR on on the phone
Let the laptop find it
Right-click on the file, and select 'Send to > Infrared Recipient'
Accept the connection on the phone
Appears in my incoming messages list

Job's a good 'un....

If it's not too daft, if John SMS'd it to you, how come you can't SMS it to your new phone, or back to John? Or to me?

The Nokia PC Suite software changed a while back from having loads of individual files in the backup to a single huge combined archive. Is your phone compatible with older versions of the software?

I don't think the archive format is that amazingly difficult to decipher. I did reverse engineer some of it but never finished.

It is purposely made to be difficult to transfer ringtones, wallpapers and games. It is so it's harder to pirate your super duper poppy crap ringtone/wallpaper/games.

When I needed to back up my T610, I hit the bluetooth icon on my Powerbook, and selected brwose device. I then got a file window that allowed me to just drag and drop all my walpapers/pictures/ringtones/themes off. Is there no such similar browse device option in the Windows bluetooth stack?

I have the Windows Bluetooth stack installed on my SP1 XP machine. It only allows DUN which is lame.