Mobile phone contacts - Phone or Sim ?

[Digby]

Your mobile phone contacts.

Do you store them on your Phone or your Sim Card ?

Due to my own silly mistake I lost all my contacts which were on my Sim Card.

Which do you think is best ?

And do you back them up to the cloud

Or do you keep a manual list ?

[kahawai chaser]

I store mine on both and Google. Also on other family's/partners sim cards. Back up gadgets exist for contact transfers.

[Nick G]

When I used android I had them saved on my google account. Now, I have them on my SIM card. In my experience, storing contacts on the phone is less reliable than storing them on the SIM card.

[Nomad]

Don't have a Android/iOS yet but I store them on both but only use the phone's memory or my phone shows duplicates. The phone's memory has more features too for smartphones ...

[Gobe1]

Phone for me, has more options to add more data birthdays etc

[mikebartnz]

Store them on my phone with a backup on Google. You just have to make sure you copy them to sim when changing phones.

[johcar]

I only use Google (which I assume caches them on the phone somewhere). Storing them on the phone (only) is less reliable than the SIM, which in turn is less reliable than storing them against your Gmail account.

If my phone is destroyed, I can be up again with a new phone in minutes and haven't lost a thing (contacts-wise)...

[kahawai chaser]

But Google have sacked engineering staff for breaching privacy over Gmail contacts, i.e. snooping into contacts and corresponding conversations.

[pcuser42]

My phone pulls contacts from Google, Windows Live, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. New contacts are stored on Google.

[MushHead]

The downside of storing to SIM is that you've got bugger-all fields to store data in - not much use on a smartphone where I need emails, addresses, multiple phone numbers, etc. I store in the cloud only, with the occasional export to local storage.