Iphone 3gs: transferring contacts from old phone without iTunes or Windows

After using a Nokia E61i for a very long time, I have moved on to an Iphone 3gs.

Since I picked up the phone from USA, it was locked to a US carrier.

FIRST CHALLENGE: unlock it to use it on Vodafone in India.
My phone had Base Band 5.14.x and therefore it was not unlockable....till Apple realease iOS 4.2.1 and till @sherif_hashim & @MuscleNerd released Redsn0w 0.9.6b5. see this http://bit.ly/eVAaVa

NEXT CHALLENGE : I had to transfer all my contacts from Nokia E61i to iPhone.

While this may sound very easy to most, I wanted to do this without having to boot into windows.  I use Ubuntu so I donot have iTunes or Outlook that I can sync my iPhone directly to.

Surprisingly, this was far easier than I had thought.

1. I copied all contacts on E61i onto a microsUSB card inside the phone. In Addressbook, Mark All contacts and then copy them to the card. All options are there in the addressbook menu.
2. Connected the phone to the computer using a connector cable (that came along with the Nokia phone). On connection, phone asked to choose one of the two modes - sync or data transfer. I chose Data Tansfer mode on the phone. Now the microusb card was be accessible on the computer.
3. Searched for contacts folder on the card. It had a large number of vcfs (one for every contact. Copied the same to my laptop. Remeber, I am on Ubuntu, so collated all the vcfs together using the command
   

   cat *.vcf > all_in_one.vcf

   Now I had one vcf file that had all my contacts
   
4. Now I logged into my gmail account on the web >> contacts >> Chose Import from file and pointed it to the all_in_one.vcf file. It copied all contacts to my gmail account
5. I setup my gmail account on iPhone via Exchange option. Followed the steps here. http://bit.ly/gDM2Xw 
6. When I synced my mail account on iPhone, all contacts were transferred to my iPhone.

Going forward this will also ensure that all contacts on my phone are regularly backed up on my google account.