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If you’ve bought a mobile phone in the last couple of years, and it was, like, not totally crap (or a Pay As You Go one or something) then it will do SyncML synchronisation.
What’s that? I hear you ask.
Well, the idea here is that if a phone supports SyncML then you are able to synchronise the contacts and the calendar in your phone with a SyncML server, somewhere out there on the internet. This means, in short, that you won’t lose any of your data. Buy a new phone? Just sync it with your SyncML server and you get all your contacts back off your old phone. Wipe the SIM card by accident? Just sync your phone with your SyncML server and you’ll get all the contacts and calendar info back.

You’ll need your phone to be able to access the internet for this. That probably means GPRS. SyncML is clever enough to only transmit the changed stuff, so it doesn’t use a lot of data traffic, which means that if your phone does GPRS at all then you should be OK; you don’t need to pony up a lot of money for extra data transfer. You will need to be able to use that GPRS stuff as part of your talk plan, but you probably already can, and your mobile phone operator will be able to help you with that anyway.

You can run your own SyncML server if you’re desperate to, but don’t bother. Instead, wing your way over to mobical.net and sign up for an account. They’re bloody great. Once you’ve synced, they display all your contacts and a nicely formatted calendar containing your appointments. They’re free, and have sworn blind they’ll remain so. Better still, they know about lots of phones; if you go there and sign up for an account, and tell them your phone type and phone number, they’ll send your phone some connection details, which means you don’t have to bother typing in any configuration into your phone with the stupid phone keypad. Just wait for the SMS to arrive, say “yes, I accept these connection details“, and then off you go into the menus to find “Synchronisation“. (It’s in “Connectivity” on the K700i.) Hit that and, pow, all your contacts and calendar are now saved on the web. Very very handy indeed. Tell ‘em I sent you.