Since I just received a HTC Surround running Windows Phone 7, I thought I would like to share some of my experiences making the switch from an iPhone to this new phone.

To begin with I can say that I have been using first an iPhone 3GS and then an iPhone 4 for about 3-4 years, so I was pretty accustomed to the iPhone. The upgrade from 3GS to 4 went without any trouble using an iTunes backup. Unfortunately that scenario was ruled out switching to a Windows Phone. So some things had to be considered.

I have been moving many things into the cloud lately, so a lot of things would be simple to move. Some of the easy (with some magic involved) items were

• My private email running off gmail using IMAP
• My work email running of an exchange server
• My notes in Evernote
• My books in Amazon Kindle
• My private contacts (synchronized with a local Outlook through Windows Live – had to go the csv path)

Off course I am now bound to find some alternative apps/games for all the rest, but at least I got the basics covered.

One thing I was missing though was my stream of text messages. I like to keep a history so off course I would like to get my text messages with me to on the new phone. But from looking at the internet a bit I couldn’t seem to find any clear path for this.

So what to do? Well first things first. I made a backup of my iPhone. This produced a lot of backup files and in particular it created a file named C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\[DEVICE SPECIFIC GUID]\3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28