Help Help:Google contacts

[Bertie]

I am shortly going to be changing my phone from my HTC Desire (which has been fantastic). I want to be able to simply transfer my contacts from Google to my new phone which will be an android phone-probably Galaxy SIII.
I have read a message elsewhere that told users to transfer all contacts to SD card, which I have done, and to use my email app to send to my google account from where I can then send out to my new phone.
I just can't carry out the task from the SD card onwards.
Everytime I switch on my internet I get the syn symbol and so I thought it was syncing all my contacts with the internet but when I checked my email contacts they are not there. Should my email contacts and my phone contacts be in the same place in my google account?
Any instructions would be much appreciated. Please keep them detailed and simple!
Thanks
Bertie

 

[coos lick]

You shouldn't need to do anything. If all your contacts are already google contacts, when you log onto your new phone with your google address, it will automatically download all your contacts from your google account.

Its a pretty cool feature. If for example you log onto your google account from a PC, and edit your contacts there (say if you want to add more detail and/ or change the spelling of names) then the edited contacts will be automatically updated on your phone without you having to do anything!

 

[Hadron]

Assuming that your contacts are not synced with Google (and I explain how to check below), there are two different approaches here:

1. Export contacts to SD:

This writes your phonebook into a vcard file on the SD card. Pop the SD card into another phone and import, and you are done. If your new phone doesn't have a SD card slot, just copy from Desire to computer, then from computer to new phone.

In the import stage you may get the choice as to whether you store them as phone or google contacts, but I think I read somewhere that that was no longer there in ICS.

2. Convert Phone contacts to Google:

I guess this is what you are trying to do. In fact it sounds like you may be trying to follow these instructions, in which case the key bit is that just mailing to yourself doesn't automatically do it, and you should use a computer rather than your gmail app to do the import.

But first, check whether your contacts are already synced. Look in your phone's contacts app settings and see whether they are "Google" or "Phone" contacts, or a mix of both. If they are all Google then they will be synced already. To check, log on to GMail via a browser, click on the red word "GMail" in the top-left (which has a subtle "down arrow" next to it) and select "Contacts" from the drop-down list, and see whether they are actually there. That's also where you'll find the "import contacts" option the other instructions refer to.

But if your contacts are all phone contacts then the simplest way of converting is probably to export contacts to SD (as in option 1), clear contacts storage, then import them as Google contacts. Then sync.