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Duplicate contacts when texting/calling?

P

.ParanoidAndroid.

Member
Hello everyone.
I got myself an HTC Desire the other day and so far I'm pretty much in love.
However!

In my contacts, I've got it set to only show Phone contacts, and I've hidden Sim/Gmail contacts.
I've also linked all my contacts with their Facebook profiles.
So in my contacts list (People), it's fine.

However, when I go to messaging and start typing a name in the To field, there's a duplicate of everyone. As far as I can see, there's no similar "hide SIM" option etc for the texting/calling, so I'm just wondering how to sort this?

I saw someone to try deleting all phone contacts and just using your SIM contacts but to be honest I'd rather not do this, since I like to just use my SIM contacts as a basic backup if you get me.

So any ideas?
Thanks!
 
What you need to do is link all the contacts up. That way you won't have any duplicates.
 
Having exactly the same issue and read many other people with it but no definitive answer as to how to get round it. I can only assume its just a pish system. It certainly put a dampner on my "getting my Desire finally" day :(
 
Removing the SIM contacts will not resolve this. I have no SIM contacts at all and I still receive this problem. In my "People" I have Exchange, Google and Facebook contacts. They are all linked so I have no duplicate contacts in the People section of the phone. However whenever I compose and email or SMS, I am given a list of duplicate contacts with the same phone numbers and email addresses. This even happens if I change the View in the People widget to only show Exchange contacts (unticking Facebook and Google contacts)
 
Yes, this is unfortunately how it functions and as yet, there is no known work around.

In the message app, it shows a contact point for every contact directory (google, facebook etc) and every medium (phone, email etc).

Dave has a google contact with phone and email. He has the same information in facebook. In messages you now have 4 Daves.

Of course if you remove facebook sync, you will only have 2 Daves, but thats rubbish.
 
Yeah, hrmph

It's a pretty spectacularly basic problem and I'm perplexed as to why it even exists
I mean, it seems to me there's pride in this system of linking a contacts various social accounts, it's a cornerstone feature of the phone it seems

So it's an extremely obvious and annoying problem
Who knows, hopefully it'll be fixed soon.
 
This was annoying me today also, glad I came on here and realised it is actually a known problem and not me being a dumb blonde :D
 
Why not just update all contacts to Google and then just get rid of the contacts on your SIM and phone? That way there will be no duplicates, add the fact that the SIM can only hold basic info and not in the same format of smartphones. This way you will same time have a good backup of your contacts should something go wrong somewhere along the line
 
How would I sync all my phone contacts to my Gmail/Google account then?
I only have a handful of existing contacts on my Gmail contact list and those have been synced already, but as far as I can tell I'd have to input all my phone contacts manually onto my Gmail accnt...
 
.ParanoidAndroid. said:
The reason I don't want to do that is because it's a phone, and I want my contacts stored on my phone

I don't think I'm being unreasonable.
Click to expand...

I agree with you perfectly. HTC need to sort this issue out.

.ParanoidAndroid. said:
How would I sync all my phone contacts to my Gmail/Google account then?
I only have a handful of existing contacts on my Gmail contact list and those have been synced already, but as far as I can tell I'd have to input all my phone contacts manually onto my Gmail accnt...
Click to expand...

Go to people, then Export to SD card. IMO it should save in Vcard format, which you can directly import into gmail.
This is what I did with my old dumbphone.
 
.ParanoidAndroid. said:
The reason I don't want to do that is because it's a phone, and I want my contacts stored on my phone

I don't think I'm being unreasonable.
Click to expand...
I don't quite understand. Once you have synced all contacts to Google, you can merge any additional duplicates quite easily. If you then delete all contacts from the phone and sync from Google, all the google contacts will be stored on your phone & a back-up on your google account. If you are going to use the sim as a backup, you will not be able to store more than 1 contact detail per name. So if you have 3 phone numbers and 2 emails for 1 person on your phone, this will end up as 5x contacts on the sim? I have not had a single contact on any of my sim cards since probably 2004. I always keep a master copy on my PC for backup and now simply on my Google account. On the sim is just way too much work and all my contacts, let alone the contact details won't be saved.
 
Eugene's Mac said:
I don't quite understand. Once you have synced all contacts to Google, you can merge any additional duplicates quite easily. If you then delete all contacts from the phone and sync from Google, all the google contacts will be stored on your phone & a back-up on your google account. If you are going to use the sim as a backup, you will not be able to store more than 1 contact detail per name. So if you have 3 phone numbers and 2 emails for 1 person on your phone, this will end up as 5x contacts on the sim? I have not had a single contact on any of my sim cards since probably 2004. I always keep a master copy on my PC for backup and now simply on my Google account. On the sim is just way too much work and all my contacts, let alone the contact details won't be saved.
Click to expand...

Read surreyfox's post above and you'll understand the problem.
 
I had the same problem, its a right pain and should be so so basic to sort. I transferred all my contacts to gmail, had to delete all the duplicate contacts, then sync the phone - proper palava!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
I got a HTC desire recently and my plan is to just make gmail my master contact list. What I notice happens though is that I have a number of contacts in gmail (ie: they are classed as "google" contacts in the section where it says "Linked contacts") where there is a duplicate even though there is not a duplicate in my actual gmail contacts list. So what happens is that the 2 different "google" contacts are linked instead of being merged into a single contact that shouldn't need to be linked to itself. So when you want to edit the contact for example, one entry might have the email address and the other has the phone number.

Any suggestions on on how to merge the different "google" entries into the one contact?
 
Ha I just worked it out. In gmail there are "other contatcs" which appear to be anyone that I've ever sent an email to, but haven't added as a contact. When I add them as a new contact, android is obviously seeing the two different entries. So I clicked "find and merge" duplicates from within my online gmail account and then re-synced the HTC and now it has removed those duplicates from the phone. YAY :-)
 
I had a very similar problem with my Samsung Captivate. I noticed double contacts in my stock yahoo email. The problem started when I synced my gmail account to my phone. (I since stopped the auto sync since I no longer use my gmail account). I went into my phone contacts and deleted all the contacts that were synced from my gmail account. All the contacts with a g beside them. I went back into my stock yahoo email and there is no more duplicates. I'm assuming the duplicates came from me syncing from gmail and my yahoo email. Not sure if that makes sense but it worked. I just now fixed it when I searched and found this thread.

Hope this helps someone else.
 
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