My parents have recently each purchased an iPhone 5 and asked me to set them up. One of the most important things when changing mobile phones is transferring your contacts.  But Apple don’t make it very easy.

I’m an Android man, I have never owned an Apple device nor do I know much about how they work or behave. Which is probably similar to quite a few people out there. So I turn to good old Google for a bit of advice.

Hours of searching on Google turned up a lot of rubbish about how you can back up your contacts through iTunes (which doesn’t seem to be supported any more), or backing up to and managing them through Gmail or Yahoo Mail, which would be good if I wanted to do that, but I wanted to get them onto the iCloud so they can synchronise and constantly update from that source. So I had to get a little bit creative and I thought that I’d share it with you who may be wanting the same end result – transferring your contacts quickly and easily (for free) from your Blackberry device in bulk onto the iCloud, here’s how…..

You will need:

• Your Blackberry device.
• Your iPhone – this needs to be set up so it is backing up to your contacts to your iCloud account. Check your settings.
• Your Blackberry USB cable.
• Blackberry Desktop Software – if you don’t have this you can get it here.
• A PC or laptop with Microsoft Outlook installed (I’m using Office 2007).
• A Yahoo! account.
• TextPad 7 Software – if you don’t have it you can get it here. I used version 7.0.9.
• A cup of tea or a GnT if it’s after 6pm!

[…]