Get iPhone contacts onto Mac

[Nermal]

Hi,

This sounds like it should be easy but I can't figure out how to do it! I got my first iPhone a couple of days ago and I've added a few people to the Contacts app on there. I'd like to get these onto my computer.

In iTunes on my computer, I can go to the Info tab and choose "Sync Address Book Contacts" but when I do this it tells me that this is not necessary because I have iCloud. However, I can't figure out how to get Address Book to "talk" to iCloud; this doesn't appear to happen automatically. I tried turning on "Synchronise with MobileMe" in Address Book preferences but it seems that this doesn't accept an iCloud account.

iTunes also says that I can continue anyway without using iCloud but that I may end up with duplicate data. Is this likely to actually cause a problem? What's the easiest way to have the same contacts on both systems?

I'm running OS 5.0.1 on my phone (4S) and 10.6.8 on my computer.

 

[Weaselboy]

You need Lion OS X 10.7 for iCloud on your Mac. Once you install Lion you will have an iCloud pref pane in System Preferences to enter your iCloud user name and password.

 

[Nermal]

It's a bit silly for iTunes to tell you to use iCloud when you're on an OS that doesn't support it (which is why I thought that I was missing something obvious).

Nevertheless, I figured it out:

1. On the phone, go to Settings > iCloud and turn Contacts off. When it asks whether to remove contacts that came from iCloud, choose not to. If you choose Yes then it'll go ahead and delete all contacts whether you synched them from iCloud or not!

2. On the computer, turn on Sync Address Book Contacts. It'll no longer warn about duplicate data and when you hit Sync it'll bring the contacts across.

All sorted