My wife recently got a Samsung Exhibit II 4G Android phone to replace her aging Nokia E63. Migrating her contacts was accomplished fairly easily by exporting them to CSV with Nokia PC Suite and then importing them into Google Contacts. Migrating SMSes was not so trivial however.

Other approaches

There are a couple methods floating around the web, but none were suitable. This one uses Gammu to retrieve the SMSes from the Nokia, and then a script to convert them to an XML format readable by SMS Backup & Restore. It turns out that Gammu doesn't work on Symbian S60v3 devices however. This script can convert SMSes exported by the MsgExport app to XML for SMS Backup & Restore, but I didn't feel like paying for it or dealing with the Ovi Store. VeryAndroid is a Windows application which can convert SMSes from Nokia PC Suite CSV format and sync them directly to an Android device, and Nokia2AndroidSMS can convert SMSes from the OVI Suite database to XML for SMS Backup & Restore. I didn't want to deal with more Windows software though, so I just decided to write my own.

Formats

I already had the Nokia PC Suite installed and was using it to migrate contacts, so I decided to work with the CSV output it generates for messages. A received SMS looks like this:

sms,deliver,"+16501234567","","","2012.06.13 19:13","","Leaving now"

and a sent SMS looks like this:

sms,submit,"","+16501234567","","2012.06.13 19:11","","Where are you?"

The fields are:

• 0: "sms" for SMSes (MMS is presumably different)
• 1: "deliver" for received messages, "submit" for sent messages
• 2: Sender's phone number (blank for sent messages)
• 3: Recipient's phone number (blank for received messages)
• 5: Date and time in "YYYY.MM.DD HH:MM" format and local timezone
• 7: Message body

Fields 4 and 6 are always empty for SMSes (they are probably used for MMSes, one being the message subject).

I also decided to generate XML for the SMS Backup & Restore app. The XML format looks like this:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' standalone='yes' ?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="sms.xsl"?>
<smses count="1">
  <sms
    protocol="0"
    address="+16501234567"
    date="1341025384351"
    type="1"
    subject="null"
    body="Leaving now"
    toa="null"
    sc_toa="null"
    service_center="+12063130025"
    read="1"
    status="-1"
    locked="0"
    date_sent="null"
    readable_date="Jun 29, 2012 8:03:04 PM"
    contact_name="(Unknown)"
  />
</smses>

but can be reduced down to this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<smses count="1">
    <sms
        protocol="0"
        address="+16501234567"
        date="1341025384351"
        type="1"
        body="Leaving now"
        read="1"
        status="-1"
    />
</smses>

The attributes of the <sms> element are:

• protocol: Always "0" (possibly different for MMS)
• address: Sender or recipient phone number
• date: Date and time in milliseconds since 1 January 1970
• type: "1" for received message, "2" for sent messages
• body: Message body
• read: "1" if the message has been read
• status: Always "-1"

The script

I implemented a script called [nokia2android.py] in [Python] to convert one or more CSV files to this XML format.

./nokia2android.py received.csv sent.csv > android.xml

The XML file can then be transferred to the Android device (using USB or Bluetooth) and stored in /sdcard/SMSBackupRestore. It will then be presented as an option after selecting the Restore button in the app.