Ovi Contacts website discontinued

GLOBAL – We will be discontinuing access to the Ovi Contacts website as of January 24, 2012. Contacts on your Nokia phone will not be affected, and you can continue syncing and backing up your data normally. In other words, you’ll still be able to use and back up your contacts on your Nokia phone: the only change will be that web access to your contacts on ovi.com will no longer be available.

We understand this is an inconvenience, but we are committed to helping you access your contacts whenever you need to, so you’ll be able to continue using the contacts on your device as normal.

First, if you are an Ovi Contacts user, you will have six weeks before the web service will be discontinued. But even after that date, you will still be able to easily export your synced Contacts data to a PC at any time.

Second, if you would like to continue using a web-based contacts service, here are the steps you need to follow so you can export your contacts to alternative services like Hotmail, Microsoft Outlook 2010, Yahoo! Mail, gMail or Apple Address Book (Lion OS):

• Visit contactsui.ovi.com from your personal computer.
• Login to your Ovi account.
• Click the green button below the message text.
• 

• Save the file to your local drive (take a note of the folder you put it in).
• Click on the file to review and access your data file
• Your contact data is in .csv format.
• Once you have selected an alternate contact service, follow their import instructions.
• When you asked to select a file for import, select to your Ovi Contact data file.
• Further information on this transition is available on our support pages. 

Why this change? This was a business decision to help us focusing on our core service offerings with the new business unit Location & Commerce, established in July 2011 at the center of our revised services strategy. Thank you for using Ovi Contacts on the web. We look forward to bringing you new and exciting services from Nokia in the future so check back here periodically for more news. And feel free to provide your feedback on what you would like to see from Nokia in the comments below. 

image credit: Cansu Cender