I recently picked up a Samsung Galaxy S4 to replace my BlackBerry Torch 9800. Although the Torch 9800 was still performing, many applications would crash due to dropped support and many websites which were not optimized for mobile would fail to load.

My first goal was to import my long list of contacts from the BlackBerry to the Android. When I asked the in-store representative, he reassured me I could sync my BlackBerry contact list with my Gmail account, so I left without assistance. Turns out Google dropped support for Google Sync for BlackBerry, and completely removed it in September 2012.

I noticed a few contacts were already in the S4 from Gmail. The last few contacts I created in the BlackBerry were assigned to my Gmail contact list, which automatically synced. Great I thought… I’ll just modify my other contacts to use my Gmail contact list instead of my default Hotmail. Turns out you can’t change it per contact once it is assigned. I decided to remove the other email accounts from the phone, making Gmail the only available account. Wow… without a service provider network connection, you cannot enter the BlackBerry email account options (even though I had an active WiFi connection). I’m backed into a corner here.

Solution – Transfer the contacts via Bluetooth
Activate the Bluetooth connections on each device and pair them together. Once they are paired, select the Android from the BlackBerry menu (Manage Connections->Bluetooth Connections->DeviceName). This will open a menu with the option to “Transfer Contacts”. The Android will ask for confirmation. Once accepted the contacts are automatically transferred. I hope this will help someone in the future, it took me too long to find this easy solution.