BlackBerry :: Storing And Running Contacts On Media Card

I have had my BB for about a month. Yesterday it froze solid and is now out for repair (two to six weeks... we'll see) I now have a Curve 8530 as a loaner, which will keep me going in the mean time.

I moved the SD card, and up came all my photos, etc.

I'm on the road a lot, so don't spend much time in front of PC, so had never synced my address book (nor have I installed the desktop manager) so now I need to re-enter all my contacts info from scratch (my phone provider moved them from my old phone during purchase... that phone is now gone).

Not wanting to do this twice, I navigated to Contacts - Options - Storage Options and selected 'Media Card' instead of 'Internal Memory' so that they would follow me back to my own phone when it comes back from repair. I really should have set that option on my own phone in the first place, but didn't know any better... it would have been great if my contact data was portable on the SD card instead of locked inside the dead phone, but live and learn.

"But wait", you're thinking, "MY phone doesn't have that option. What version of Contacts is that Curve using??" so I'll sadly admit that last paragraph is fictional. More sadly, the rest of the story is not and I'm now faced with a month of frustration as I reconstruct my contact database before I either get my unfrozen phone back, or worse, get a blank replacement. At least I can cheer myself up browsing those 200 photos I snapped during the last month, as they were all safely stashed on that 16GB SDhc chip. My kingdom for those extra few kilobytes of contact info...

Some time in the future I hope that RIM will mandate this option for ALL their applications. It is great to say that the application data is "securey stored inside the phone" and I understand there are security issues with having data exposed on removable media. But to not have at least the OPTION of keeping MY data portable is not acceptable. Provide an admin lock-out for the option for corporate/enterprise customers, sure. They have the infrastructure for backing up their users' configurations. But please allow private users like me, who rarely (or never) sync with DM, have more control of where things are stored.