With the advent of Bluetooth-enabled cell phones and the ability to sync them with our Macs via iSync, its hard not to be tempted to simply transfer contacts using Bluetooth. These days, whenever someone asks us if we have a certain other person’s number, instead of speaking the number, its oh-so much easier to simply respond with, “turn on your Bluetooth, I’ll send it to you.”
What most people assume is that only the contact numbers or the bits of the contact’s details visible to us on our cell phones are beamed across. What most don’t know is, although the majority of iSync compatible Bluetooth-enabled cell phones do not seem to display all the details as contained in our Address Book verbatim, the bulk of the contact details are stored in the cell phone nonetheless. It may not be visible on our cell phones but its there.
What happens is that Address Book and most iSync compatible cell phones use ‘vCard‘ as its default contact file format. Some phones (usually the non-Symbian equipped ones) may not support the capability to display all the fields in our vCards but that doesn’t mean its not contained in the vCard file. Its just not displayed. When its beamed across from phone-to-phone, although the receiving phone may also not be able to view the full information contained in the vCard; once ported back to the Mac OS X platform and imported into the receipient’s Address Book, all will be revealed.
The lesson to learn here?
If the contents of the vCard are too personal, its best not to carry out a phone-to-phone Bluetooth transfer of the contact. Sometimes, vCards can even contain the Notes that are appended to each vCard, depending on the cell phone’s capability. They may not be visible on the cell phone’s interface but that doesn’t mean the data isn’t there.