Vodafone 360: The messy divorce

Since deciding to ditch Vodafone 360 in favour of temporarily using a borrowed Nexus One as my primary handset, I've already hit a rather large hurdle.

Vodafone 360 doesn't let you export your contacts to the SIM card, so the Nexus One's address book is looking rather sorry. The reason I ended up with Vodafone 360 was because I'd lost my old phone - and with it the SIM storing my contacts.

I can't have been the only person to have decided to call it a day with Voda's bug-ridden service, and sure enough a quick check on Vodafone's 360 forums revealed someone else was having trouble transferring their contacts from their Samsung H1 to their shiny new Nokia N900.

"I'm afraid it's not possible to save contacts to the SIM on the H1, because everything is remotely synchronised with the 360 service rather than stored locally," said Vodafone tech support in a reply to the other 360 deserter. They even included a smiley at the end. A SMILEY!

Instead, if you really, really want to leave and 'take the kids with you', Vodafone recommends you retrieve your contacts by synchronising Vodafone 360 with Microsoft Outlook - which is likely to be easier said than done given that synchronisation is one of the buggiest parts of the service - and then cross your fingers that your new phone is also able to synchronise with Outlook.

If that doesn't work, I suppose I could either start a Facebook group requesting numbers from my friends, otherwise it looks like I'll be clearing my schedule, drinking lots of coffee, and sitting down with a pen and paper and copying my address book out by hand - a bit like a monk copying the bible. Only with more swearing.