Database Info

Finally figured out how to add to "groups"in contacts

I searched for an answer a few days ago, and didn't find one. I kind of figured out how to do it so I'd figure I'd share with others who didn't know.
I've read how everyone seemed to be pretty frustrated with the groups tab in our contacts and I shared the same frustration because I like to send mass text messages to my employees...
The groups tab only allowed you to add people from your phone memory, and won't let you pull from synced accounts like fb Gmail myspace corporate accts etc.
Like most people on here.... Most of your contacts were synced to your phones... Meaning... You had no contacts in the phone's memory.
so.... Fooling around with my phone tonight, I tried to find a solution...
I found one! Kind of...
When in your contacts.... Hit the menu key, and click on export contacts (to sd).
Once exported to the sd card, click on menu again and click import contacts (from sd).
Be careful not to interrupt the phone as is imports your contacts, or you'll do what I did and stop it halfway and have to do it all over again, causing duplicate phone entries (lots of clutter).
The phone automatically linked most (probably 90%) of the imported contacts with the existing ones.
Now go back to the groups tab, add a group, and add members to the group (now that all of your contacts are now in the phone's memory).
Now for the "kind of" part of my post....
When in the messaging app... When sending a new Group text mssg, Click on groups.... It takes about 8 seconds (seemed like forever, I thought my phone froze) to load the groups... Then when you select the group, you have to individually select the contacts within the group....
Talk about time consuming!
I was hoping that when I clicked on the group, that it would at least automatically select everyone within that group.
So.... Now I gotta figure out how to send a group text with not so many clicks and in a timely manner...

Hey this is great but unfortunately I had my import interrupted part way through also and not all contacts came through. What did you do to clean up after you imported a 2nd time??

You can also use Samsung Kies.i had a100 or so contacts synced with Exchange. I installed Kies. I then synced my contacts to Outlook and back to my phone (errr, something like that). Anyways, it did as you said and linked my contacts, but I went one step further. I then removed my Exchange account to clearall the duplicate contacts, and then setup my Exchange account again without syncing contacts. I hardly every add contacts via Outlook. Usually always done straight to the phone so this works for me as long as I sync every few months.
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bruins6020 said:
Hey this is great but unfortunately I had my import interrupted part way through also and not all contacts came through. What did you do to clean up after you imported a 2nd time??
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i shared the same fustration...
hahaha... all i did was... do the import process all over again
thus creating about 500 duplicates! what a pain!
luckily, the phone automatically links duplicate names...
it just gets really cluttered when you have gmail, fb, myspace, corporate, and phone entries...
the worst part is... the max each person can be linked is w/ 5 accounts...
so when i imported 1 and a half times, i had a few duplicate entries because it exceeded the 5 links/contact.
what a pain... i went through one by one to clean it up... im dooing a letter a day...

Edit Contacts Nightmare

Somehow my new Inspire synced with facebook, google, outlook (I guess) I have five or six entries for everyone. I linked some of them, but is there an easier way to get rid of the duplicates?

volumnus said:
Somehow my new Inspire synced with facebook, google, outlook (I guess) I have five or six entries for everyone. I linked some of them, but is there an easier way to get rid of the duplicates?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Faced with the same issue, I deleted all my phone contacts, removed the contacts sync on all my accounts, and then restored my previously exported up phone contacts backup.
And since the google contacts where all synced earlier, when I compose any email, it still prompts for emails from the previously synced contacts.
Best for u could be to take off the linking. Linking contacts messed up big time for me changing the display names, and not reverting to the one already on phone.

Go into your People app and touch Menu, choose View. Now remove checks from any account which you don't want your contacts displayed. I only have my Google contacts displayed (and have Facebook for HTC Sense only syncing with contacts in my address book for contact pictures). All other accounts (2 exchange, phone, sim, ect) are unchecked so i don't see these duplicates

I spent about two hours linking them all.
Now they only show up as one contact. It seems to be working ok so far. Will this slow down the phone, having so many duplicate, linked contacts?

I had exact same problem as you. What I did:
1. Made every contact show up (google sync, facebook, etc.)
2. Deleted ALL duplicates.
3. Saved to SD Card.
I never had a problem afterwards. I use google as a backup just in case though
I also believe that the duplicates are unnecessary, so I delete them, because I had like 4-5 duplicates for each contact.

Get GO contacts from market. Good app to manage contacts. I had 3000 "contacts" ... Came down to actual value of 200 using the app.
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[Q] How to add "phone-only, unsynced" contacts?

I can't find the answer to this questions anywhere, so I thought the good old xda community could help.
I have two exchange accounts set up in my phone and no Gmail accounts. Before I was able to add contacts as "phone only, unsynced". Now that I have the exchange accounts whenever I want to add a contact I have to choose one of those two accounts but there is no option to save "phone-only".
Question: How can I add phone-only, unsynced contacts?
Thanks in advance for any insights!

Try turning off sync temporarily on both email account under Setting-->Accounts then add a contact and see if that gives you the unsync option back when adding contacts. Let me know how it goes

Sync is off in both accounts. I only receive email through push. Thanks for suggestion though! Any other ideas?

Any ideas on this? Appreciate any help!

Possible answer
Sorry for reviving such an old thread but I had this problem and while I was searching for a solution this came up so for the sake of completeness here is a possible answer.
There is an app that allows you to import appointments from iCal files now while that is not you issue to do this the app creates a dummy account on the phone that is unsynced and from my experience you are able to add contacts under that account.
So hopefully this works for you.
Also just to mention this app is not mine nor have I had any input into it.
The app page: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=905213

Solution
Hi, I'm looking into upgrading my Motorola Atrixand in the meantime decided to update android. Immediately following the update (to 2.3), I realized that my old SIM contacts were missing. However, I noticed the missing contacts, although deleted from my SIM were somewhere on my phone. Ex. in my text history, the names were still there. I could click on a contact and when in edit mode, it read: unsynced contacts from att address book. I found no solution on android forums, etc. So I logged in to att.com and performed a search. It lead me to instructions on how to migrate contacts from 1 phone to another. I know I'm only referring to the same phone, but I tried it anyway. It worked!!
All you need to do is go to contacts, menu, export to sd card (hopefully your phone supports external storage). Then import from sd card. All my contacts are back. I first tried to export to SIM card, but It didn't work (however, this is where I could visually see my missing contacts as it allows you to select - I have over 800 contacts so I dont have time to go through the list) - I'm guessing this issue occurred to people whose complete contact list would not fit on the SIM. Probably if your contact list did fit on the SIM you did not experience this issue. If it happened to you and you do not have external storage I guess you could still use the SIM option by selecting a few contacts at a time - if you maxxed out the SIM storage you would need to delete them from SIM before copying more.
Anyway, once you do this it adds all contacts to the Google address book so you're now good to switch phones and get them just by adding your Google acount.
Hope this helps some folks - I was feeling desperate without about 150 of my oldest contacts.

[Q] Importing CSV contacts?

Saved my contacts from my iPhone on a CSV format.
I put this file on the external SD card (how do U know which is the external and which is the internal by the way?)
Went into the Infuse contacts, then "import/export" and I get "could not find Vcard contacts" (or something like that).
Any help?
Thanks so much

benyben123 said:
Saved my contacts from my iPhone on a CSV format.
I put this file on the external SD card (how do U know which is the external and which is the internal by the way?)
Went into the Infuse contacts, then "import/export" and I get "could not find Vcard contacts" (or something like that).
Any help?
Thanks so much
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Import them into gmail and they'll sync right to your phone.

Entropy512 said:
Import them into gmail and they'll sync right to your phone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
THANK YOU!
Why would anyone want their entire GMAIL contacts synced to their phone? Please, is there no other way?
Thank you

benyben123 said:
THANK YOU!
Why would anyone want their entire GMAIL contacts synced to their phone? Please, is there no other way?
Thank you
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think you can set up gmail and the phone to only sync a subset of contacts.

Entropy512 said:
I think you can set up gmail and the phone to only sync a subset of contacts.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You can. Best set up at gmail.com
You can set too sync...not to sync and can set predetermined groups. (in the past user created groups would not sync I have not played with that in several months)
once set up properly the whole google sync thing is pretty slick.
One can also login to multiple gmail accounts on the phone.
I have two currently...the main log in which is personal/phone
And a secondary account which is work
Keep in mind that changing the main phone account requires a hard reset.
Within the phone you can set up which contacts are pulled from gmail like including only contacts with phone numbers etc.
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[Q] Contacts Management & Duplicates

I have moved contacts from SIM to phone, added contacts over time, and before changing phones, moved all contacts to the SIM creating duplicates. Some I think are from facebook and have no numbers. Some I have up to 5 duplicates.
In display options I have "Only contacts with phone numbers" unchecked with everything below also checked. A particular contact has 6 entries. A couple have numbers, most are empty and one facebook. When I select show only contacts with numbers I get 2. When I go to SIM management to export to SIM I see 6 again. There is no way to distinguish which has a number or any way to filter. All there is, is a checkbox and a name 6 times. I even merged the 5 of them and when I went to export to SIM I saw all of them separately again.
I can't write all 800+ to the SIM so how can I only transfer the ones with numbers attached??? The only way I can delete the contacts without numbers is to open the contact, see if it has a number and delete. I seriously don't want to do that 500 times.
Is there a smart way to write only the contacts with numbers to the SIM? I surely would appreciate the help!
Running 2.3.6

Why are you saving to sim card? Just manage them in contacts app and they sync with Google account between devices. There's an option in Google desktop contacts to merge duplicates.
BTW, sim contacts are stored as one contact per number. So a phone contact with 2 numbers will actually create 2 separate entries when exported to sim card.

I'm looking up Google Contacts and it has been discontinued. I found Google Desktop, but then started running across all these plug-in and fixes for different problems of mismatched databases...
I write them to the SIM so I can switch it another phone and have them all. It's just how I've been doing it since before any back-up capabilities. I suppose I need to open a new email account that doesn't have a couple of hundred email addresses to deal with and no phone numbers. Facebook contacts got copied as a name only because they were an entry I guess. No email address or anything.
I do need to find some way of merging all the duplicates. Do you have another suggestion that's not going to require me to read and dig up a discontinued program that I can continue to use? lol

I'm referring to the contacts in your Google (i.e. Gmail) account, certainly no discontinued and no plugin required, just log into it from a browser and go to the contacts tab. All of your contacts should be synced from your phone and you can find duplicates and merge there, which will then sync back to your phone.
Guess I'm making the assumption that you have a Gmail or Google apps account, which is almost a necessity with an Android device.

^ what he said. Its much easier to manage contacts in Gmail and have it sync over. If you change number or lost your phone no need to ask people for their number ever.
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I agree that it's easier to maintain it how you say.
That was nuts! I thought they were already synchronized with gmail, but I guess not. I went through and deleted what I wanted in gmail, then everything in my phone. I went to sync bac and it said it couldn't becuase of too many deleted contacts. I thought, yes, just delete them. Then I watched all my contacts disappear from my gmail account on my PC. Gmail has a cool feature to resore contacts as they were minute by minute. Eventually I got the whole list back and on my phone.
Thanks for the help! Saving them to the SIM is old school now...
I rooted my phone last night and thinking about installing ICS, the second leaked version UCLD2 because I'm not liking the lock screen on 2.3.6. I want to find a setup for my Skyrocket that people are liking, but that's kind of hard.... Hey, here's a great ROM. Camera is broken, WiFi has issues, screen gets stuck in wrong orientation... but it's great! Does't seem to be much out there for the Skyrocket. I was looking in the forum here under my correct phone type. Suggestions? I know, wrong thread, just asking a BTW...

ROM
check out skyrocket Android development for Listing of Roms. I'm using SKYICS

I think that's where I got the UCLD2. I don't like it at all. I don't know if apps don't work because they're not ready, of if it's this version of ICS. People say it sucks for the battery and it's because messaging sits there and uses 90 of the cpu even in my pocket and the phone gets hot for no reason. I'll look up yours. Thanks Raven

Just click menu and merge with google
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