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Hi folks,
couple of questions around contacts.. both my wife and i now have the desire.. she just couldnt keep her hands off mine so i bought her one over the weekend..
She's keen to have her contacts in one place, set up calendar events for birthday etc.. Is that best done in gmail and then sync with the phone?
Also why can i see my facebook picture in messages (and can i get rid of it?) but i cant see my wifes when i get a message from her?
How do you get the contacts from the phone book into gmail?
Cheers,
Mick
It took me a while to figure out that there are 3 types of contacts
- phone
- google contacts
- facebook
Your phone contacts do not synchronize by default.
Google contacts are synchronized with your Gmail contacts (both ways).
Facebook contacts don't need an explanation
You can create all 3 types for one person and then link them (although you may experience some inconsistencies) so you will have one entry per person.
I myself have all the contacts saved as google contacts and I can manage them either in Desire or via my Gmail account.
so if you have phone contacts.. can you export them to google contacts?
micks_address said:
so if you have phone contacts.. can you export them to google contacts?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, you can. I exported my Phone contacts to the SDcard and imported them to my Gmail account.
Thanks - and in gmail then can you set up birthdays etc.. and the phone will then pop up reminders?
cheers for your help
mick
ferus said:
Yes, you can. I exported my Phone contacts to the SDcard and imported them to my Gmail account.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, you can manage your contacts via Gmail and sync them to your phone.
And about the birthday reminders - they do pop up (sort of).
I don't find the birthday notifications good enough. The phone reminds you 7 days in advance (which is too soon in my opinion) and only by showing you a little green sign in your phonebook. No sound, no vibration... nada.
I ended up creating an appointment for all my main contacts (using Google calendar, so it wasn't that big of a deal) so I would not forget them.
cheers - it would be nice alright if it would give you a pop up for appointments.. i guess the calendar is the way to go.. with gmail - can you set up appointments there.. and sync them with your phone? or do you use the phones calendar to set up appointments?
thanks,
mick
The synchronization works both ways. You can add/remove appointments on your Desire and they will be added/removed to your Google calendar (and vice versa).
EDIT: Desire can also show all your shared calendars as well (with corresponding colours). For example my wife shares her calendar with me (so I don't have to ask for the millionth time when some of her appointments are due) and I can see her entries marked in a different colour in my Desire's calendar.
The calendar sharing must be done from Google Calendar itself.
As for the notifications... I was trying to find an application which would extract birthdays from your contacts and either set them as appointments automatically or manage the reminders from the app. Unfortunately I was not able to find a working one.
My Favorite is using Google Contact method. So our contact will auto Sync with Google.. this is seamless backup solutions for me
Just bought my Desire
I wanted to start out clean, so I wiped out my Google contacts and calender.
Now I'd like to pull all of my FB friends to the phone and to Google Contacts, including birthdays into calender.
I've set up the sync to FB, and when going to People -> Online Directories -> FB I can see all of my FB friends, and can even call which ever of them has a phone number available on he's details, but for every contact who's details I want to see, the phone has to connect to the internet to retrieve that information, meaning it's not stored locally on the phone. Also, there are no contacts at People -> All.
Also, birthdays now appear on the phone's calender, but after syncing the phone calender with Google calender, I don't see any of that on there, meaning it doesn't sync ...
Another glitch is that although birthdays now all appear on the phone's calender, events which I have marked as attending on FB don't appear at all on the phone's calender.
Basically what I'd like is to copy all of my FB friends to my phone's memory as well as to Google contacts, and keep them linked and auto-synced.
Also to have all the birthdays that I already have on my phone's calender appear on my Google calender automatically, as well as FB events.
Is that too much to ask? :-X
Help would be much appreaciated...
So no ideas how to get it done... ?
Solution for birthday notifications
Go to a contact (any contact) and then go to the events tab (with the circle arrows). Press menu, go into settings, and there is your holy grail.
How does that help ... ? :-X
Hi I was wondering if anyone knows if you can merge together google contacts you've linked together using your desire. So the contacts would be merged in gmail and not just on my phone.
I've searched and haven't found anyone even raise the issue, so I was hoping someone knew if you could do this and if so how?
Thanks for any help.
No luck here either, it drives me crazy that I have contacts for people in 5 different places and I'm too lazy to manually merge them. The damn thing should just automerge and sync them all to google.
Thanks for your response,
I'd wrongly assumed there must be an option to sync the merges back to Google, as like you say that's what it should do, at least now I know to give up looking for the option, cheers.
And unfortunately I'm to lazy to do it manually too (took me long enough to do on the phone)
Once you sync contacts so long as you sync with Outlook/Google it should keep the links. Might take a while at first but once done it should be permanent
Yea I understand that, but I would have liked them to be merged if I looked at the contacts through Gmail on a computer, or if I updated to Froyo without Sense.
So rather than just keep the links, actually merge the contacts, for if I using something other than an HTC phone with Sense.
fozzy010 said:
Yea I understand that, but I would have liked them to be merged if I looked at the contacts through Gmail on a computer, or if I updated to Froyo without Sense.
So rather than just keep the links, actually merge the contacts, for if I using something other than an HTC phone with Sense.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Exactly, I use multiple devices and I want all my contacts centralized and not duplicated.
Ahhh, got ya! So it'd have the info without linking to Facebook you mean?
Suppose you could just update the contact with all info you want on it and sync this with your devices...
Could try using Thunderbird as your pc email client (it has a duplicate contact add on) and something like Zindus to sync with gmail. This way you use your pc to sort your contacts and then sync to gmail, and then gmail to your phone. I've found this to work as long as you keep all of the contacts on Thunderbird under the default group (I created a group/email list and have spent the last two days working out why everyone in the group had disappeared from my phone:|)
Iain
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EddyOS said:
Ahhh, got ya! So it'd have the info without linking to Facebook you mean?
Suppose you could just update the contact with all info you want on it and sync this with your devices...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yea so for example, because some of my contacts are quite old, they were set up when you could only have one number with a contact so for some i have:
x mobile
x home
x work
so as HTC made it relatively easy I decided to merge these all into one contact.
Likewise for a lot of them I had email addresses stored on my gmail account, and HTC made it relatively easy to link these the email to a contact.
So I now have a set of nicely constructed contacts on my phone, but multiple entries for them in my google account, so would have liked an option to just make the links a permanent merge.
And yea I know I can do this manually, but it took long enough to do this on my phone in the first place, and as I've already said I'm too lazy to do it again. This thread wasn't meant to me moaning, just checking to see if there was a merger option or trick I was missing.
Edit: Thanks Iain I'll have a look at that when I have some spare time
Lol, I know it wasn't a moaning thread - don't think there is the option at the moment. TBH I bite the bullet and have a good prune session every now and then and get Outlook fully up to date and sync off that. I don't sync with Google
Damn, I loved the contact merging on my HTC Diamond, gmail was always up-to-date. Why the hell is HTC not doing the same on Android but just linking.... It looks good on the phone but is a mess in gmail...
If you have multiple Google contacts it's pretty easy to merge them online:
http://mail.google.com/mail/contacts/ui/ContactManager
(have to be logged into gmail to access it )
THX for that hint. But what I loved in TouchFlo was that my gmail conacts got automatically updated with info from Facebook, like the birthdays for example which then also showed up in the Google Calendar. Or when somebody changed mail adress or phonenumber, via TouchFlo these were automatically propagated to the Gogle Contacts.
Think this a FB issue, know they recently changed API access to prevent apps pulling down Birthdays automatically and saving of phone numbers has always been a no no for any apps.
Droid gets around this by preventing saving the number permanently or amending on the device.
Old thread I know, but I was looking to do this and solved it.
-Export your address book on the phone to vcard.
-Email yourself this file. (You may need astro to find it. I used k9 mail and astro)
-Save this file on your PC.
-Goto your google contacts list on your PC.
-Import a vcard. Direct it to this file.
-Google automagically merges the contacts for you.
The unfortunate part is that you still have to manually delete the contacts that were on your phone, but at least everything is in the cloud now. You could just blow away your contacts entirely and resync.
Geekybiker said:
Old thread I know, but I was looking to do this and solved it.
-Export your address book on the phone to vcard.
-Email yourself this file. (You may need astro to find it. I used k9 mail and astro)
-Save this file on your PC.
-Goto your google contacts list on your PC.
-Import a vcard. Direct it to this file.
-Google automagically merges the contacts for you.
The unfortunate part is that you still have to manually delete the contacts that were on your phone, but at least everything is in the cloud now. You could just blow away your contacts entirely and resync.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks, I'll try this later. It's still a problem that's bugging me to death. I keep getting returned 5 or 6 of the same number for a contact. Hopefully this will help.
Geekybiker said:
Old thread I know, but I was looking to do this and solved it.
-Export your address book on the phone to vcard.
-Email yourself this file. (You may need astro to find it. I used k9 mail and astro)
-Save this file on your PC.
-Goto your google contacts list on your PC.
-Import a vcard. Direct it to this file.
-Google automagically merges the contacts for you.
The unfortunate part is that you still have to manually delete the contacts that were on your phone, but at least everything is in the cloud now. You could just blow away your contacts entirely and resync.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Bit of a necromance but ran into this issue with my Desire HD.
Thanks for the solution, can't believe there's not a better way....
I have all my contacts in Gmail. All their numbers and email addresses are in there.
So whenever I edit a contact, it's edited in Gmail. It's pretty much all 'in the cloud'.
I use Outlook categories to keep my contacts clean and manageable. For syncing I am currently using MyPhoneExplorer after coming to grief with HTC Sync.
I've done some research now.
I found the app in the market called: GO contacts
this app can export ALL your contacts, also the ones that your HTC or android found with syncing with facebook, hyves, twitter, whatsapp, linkedin etc.
exported and imported in my gmail, so I have all the contacts in my gmail.
If they now remove their phone number (from facebook in example)
I still have it
Ok..finally got my Desire to Froyo..have been quite happy until I noticed that I can no longer upload Calendar updates to my PC's Outlook calendar.
I can make changes on the my Windows 7 PC's Outlook Calendar and have that go to my Desire but any Calendar changes on my Desire will not synch up to my PC's Outlook calendar. There are no problems with synch'ing contacts. Yes, I used the PC Synch calendar on the Desire.
This wasn't a problem before. Is HTC Synch not 100% compatiblewith Froyo?
Thanks for any insights.
PS:
1) Tried uninstalling/reinstalling HTC synch - no change there.
2) I've also noted that recurring entries in the calendar (eg: Birthdays) are getting duplicated on the days they occur (ie: 2 entries in the same day). Also, there are duplicate contacts being produced too.
sorry i'm not going to be much help here but i agree that htc sync is unpredictable at best. i constantly have to reboot my pc or phone or both to get sync to work and now my contacts have stopped syncing. again.
you might want to search for a leak of the updated version of htc sync to see if that helps. i'm assuming that it was pulled for a valid reason but it might be worth a try ...
DesireOwner10 said:
PS:
1) Tried uninstalling/reinstalling HTC synch - no change there.
2) I've also noted that recurring entries in the calendar (eg: Birthdays) are getting duplicated on the days they occur (ie: 2 entries in the same day). Also, there are duplicate contacts being produced too.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I also have the same behaviour, new entries in the phone calendar are not added to the outlook calendar despite being flagged as "PC Sync"
For the birthday thing, I think that it is to do with the info you have stored against a contact in their contact card in outlook, if you have a date for their birthday in the details section of the contact, then sync repeatedly adds it to the calendar for you, even if it is there already
I have the same problem. So I've moved all Calendar entries in Outlook to temporary forder, then from Desire removed Outlook account, manually deleted all Outlook calendar entries in Desire's Calendar (they have left there, despite of account deletion) , then recreated Outlook account (Calendar after all these steps synced OK), and moved back all Calendar entries in Outlook from temporary folder back to main. This solved the non sync problem.
After all I've talked with Exchange specialist. He said, that for some reason Calendar database in Desire become corrupt, and after that the syncing become unimpossible.
Ok, I've managed to fix this (I think anyway!) works for me with outlook 2003, Couple of steps:
Step 1 (optional) gets your missing items onto your PC:
In HTC sync Manger (on PC) go into "settings" then calendar, then click properties, untick deafult calendar and then when selecting the folder to sync with, create a new calendar "temp" or something
Now sync with that calendar: for me this meant that everything on my phone (including the items not uploading before) now goes into this new calendar
Now go back and revert to syncing to the original calendar (the default calendar or me) and lo and behold the missing items now sync up to that too
I thought this was everything sorted, but new items created in the phone still don't sync up to outlook....
so Step 2:
On phone, go into settings, applications, manage applications, all
then for calendar and calendar storage apps go in and "clear data", this will leave you with an empty calandar on your phone, but don't panic...
in HTC sync manger (on PC) go into settings and unselect contact syncing (otherwise the PC will overwrite contact info)
Then go into "repair" and select option for PC to overwrite phone
you can now reselect contacts to sync too under settings menu in HTC sync
Having done this, everything is back on my phone and (for now at least) new appointment items created on the phone sync up correctly too
Hope this helps someone,
P
THANKS!
GENIUS.
popkid's solution works. HTC should employ you..none of their ideas worked, your's did.
1000 cheers for taking the time to work out and post the solution!
Caution HTC Sync 3.0.5422
(Bravo_Froyo_HTC_WWE_2.09.405.8-1.21.405.2_release4dua3bcrut4wrv30)
3.0 does not have the feature to do a repair - force copy clean from handset or PC.
For me, sych has resulted in a large number of yearly recurring all day events being duplicated and copied with a one hour adjustment - the new ones run from 1:00-1:00 and thus span two days.
I am back using 2.0.33 (which is not without bugs either)
Okay, so I decide to transfer some contacts from a Nokia 6680 to my Desire, and I did it via Bluetoothing .vcf files from one to the other. Easy enough. Like any good smartphone user, I synced them immediately w/ GMail.
However, after the sync, I opened my Gmail and could not see the newly-synced Nokia contacts. Only the pre-Bluetooth phonebook entries were there. So I did the whole Bluetooth bit again, synced, but the problem remained.
Then I noticed that the phonebook entries that remained were all classified as Google contacts on my Desire (because that's the way I saved them when I inputted them before). These Nokia contacts were saved automatically under "Phone", and so I did not have the option of saving them as Google contacts, and perhaps because of that they couldn't be saved as "syncable" phonebook entries. Neither can the phonebook entries be edited to become Google contacts after saving.
Anyone got any ideas about a remedy to this? I'm about to dispose of the old Nokia, so it'd be good if all my contacts were on GMail, syncable at any time.
Thanks for any help
Go to People press menu then import export, export to sd card and then do the same but import them. When you will import an option with save as google contacs will appear.
When I got my Android phone I exported the Nokia contacts, via outlook, and imported them directly into Gmail on my laptop. It then let me edit and clean up at the same time.
I don't know if this was the most efficient way but it worked for me.
I use several gmail accounts and the Gmail app on the phone is set up to show messages from all of them. This is great, but at the same time the phone tends to associate all other things with at least one of these Google accounts.
My main problem is the Calendar (both stock and third-party, I tried Cal from Any.do). The stock app is constantly syncing with Google, although in Google account settings calendar sync is turned off. Moreover, the Calendar assigns new events to the account I was using last in Gmail. As a result, the Calendar is now a mess since all events are scattered between several Google calendars and none of them are syncing with the HTC PC software. That was a problem after Lollipop update when I needed to do a factory reset and lost most of the events.
Is there a way to separate the Calendar from any kind of account present on the phone? I do not need sync, I do not need to share, I do not need my calendar to be connected to anything, for me it's just a simple list of events and tasks. I would like to be able to back it up on my PC (and not any kind of Cloud). But this is only needed rarely and I certainly don't care about past events. What I also would like to do is to consolidate the events scattered over multiple accounts into one local, offline calendar.
I can't find a way to do so with neither the stock Calendar, nor with the Cal from Any.do. If anyone can suggest what to do, I will be very grateful.