I started moving from an ancient Palm handheld to Android. Moving the contacts over without putting them all in the cloud was pretty straightforward. I just used the Palm Desktop to export as VCard.
After doing that, I went through the VCard file and changed Palm-CustomN fields into NOTE;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE: fields (or appended to an existing note). This is described in more detail at: www.deepwave.net/articles/palm/palm_ctctvcard/.
After doing all this, I noticed that some of my contacts didn’t get moved over. In fact, they didn’t show up on the Palm Desktop either!
It took me a while before I realized that the records that were missing were the hidden records. Duh! I then set the Palm Desktop to show hidden records, exported them to VCard, hacked out the custom fields, and was off and running.
After doing the imports, I realized I should have exported one category at a time - this would have saved me recategorizing the whole wad on Android.