The Newest After-Sale Service in China: Smartphone Contact Transfer

Buying a new smartphone is never as simple as you’d like it to be. There’s the matter of transferring your SIM card, finding the right sort of case and screen cover to protect your new investment, and of course the much-dreaded transfer of contacts between any phones that use different systems. There are probably some apps for that, but why bother when you can get it done professionally for you right there in the market?

A reporter from the Beijing Evening News says he spotted a shop offering high-speed contact transfer service at a mobile phone market in Beijing’s Shuangjing area. Apparently, thirty percent of their customers make use of this service after buying new phones. Some of them just don’t want to bother making the transfer themselves, and others are dealing with incompatible operating systems where a transfer might require manual input they don’t want to bother with.

The shop charges based on the number of contacts you’ve got. Transferring fewer than 500 contacts will run you 60 RMB ($9), transferring 500-800 costs 80 RMB ($12), and transferring 800-1200 costs 120 RMB ($19). The process works using a computer as an intermediary, transferring contacts from most operating systems to the computer first and then, if necessary, tweaking them so that they can be exported onto the new phone’s system. Of course, they promise to delete your data from the computer once the transfer is complete.

It will be interesting to see if this sort of service becomes more frequent or if somebody is able to establish a format for storing contacts that becomes an accepted standard that works across platforms. It also seems like a pretty serious privacy risk — a promise of deletion wouldn’t be nearly good enough for me — so if the service catches on, I’d expect at least some vendors to be making a little money selling stolen data on the sly. So transfer carefully!

[Beijing Evening News via Sina Tech, Image via eHow]