HTC Hero Google Contacts Sync broken : duplicates on Hero and empty on GMail

[swiss_chris]

Hello,

Can any one help with the following problem. I'd really appreciate it. This phone, as promising as it is, keeps giving me head-aches...

On my HTC Hero all my contacts (they are all "Google" contacts) are duplicate. I deleted all contacts from GMail (they were NOT duplicate on GMail), have seen my HTC resyncing my contacts various times since (while in the Settings->Data Sync->Google Menu), but all 2000+ contacts remain in my phone!

Obviously, I'm just trying to delete duplicates (why they suddenly appeared I do not know), but at the moment my phone seem not to sync at all!

Can any one tell me how to delete ALL Contacts from my phone and then resync (after I reimport my GMail contacts)? Is there no other way to select each of my almost 3000 contacts manually to delete???

Thanks,
Chris

 

[vjprakashbe]

People->Menu->Delete Contacts->Menu->Select All

 

[mez]

you shouldnt have to do this but....

export all your phone contacts from the phone to the sd card as a csv, there are a few back up things that can do this for you.

import the csv file from the sd card to gmail. check everyone is in gmail correctly and then .... delete everyone from the phone. then re do the sync.


long winded and a pain in the ... but it works. just need to make sure that the phone numbers are still in the correct format.

ie

+44 not 44....
and
07 7.....

 

[swiss_chris]

Thank you both for your useful replies. This is not the first time I find some of the menu options of my HTC Hero to be extremely well hidden (cf. the volume of the alarm )!

I'm expecting it to take my phone more than 1h to delete 2500 contacts (2s per contact). This is not normal!

Will try to post if I was successful after a new import into GMail Contacts and resync.

Thanks again,
Chris

 

[swiss_chris]

O.k. - it speeds up a bit. It seems in stead of deleting every contact it finds, it has to look for each contact individually that it wants to delete, thereby speeding up as more and more contacts have already been deleted. I guess that's the disadvantage of not having programmed a "delete all" option...

 

[ianr]

Best bet is to sort out your contacts properly in gmail's contact manager, then back them up by exporting the contacts just in case. Then go to menu->settings->applications->manage applications then select the contacts storage, hit "clear data", then reboot the phone. This causes it to resync everything with the contacts in gmail. I've had to do the similar thing with the calendar in the early days of using the Hero.

 

[swiss_chris]

Wow - now that's useful to know! I wish I had known that before factory resetting my phone!

I ended up doing a factory reset on my phone. Why? After deleting my 2600+ contacts, the sync wouldn't work. It kept telling me "{2631} contacts deleted. Too many deleted contacts... what would you like to do (delete them, restore them, do nothing)". Every time I hit "delete them" it would pretend to be doing something for 1-10 minutes, and the next time the error message came it had removed 1-10 contacts from some hidden deleted contacts list. After 2 h of doing this and still having around 2500 "deleted contacts" I decided to do a factory restart.

24 later (having installed only 1 application from the Market: a shopping list!) my HTC crashed on me (it had also crashed twice on the day before the factory reset - it wouldn't wake up from sleep mode). I had to restart it by taking out the battery. I'm thinking of sending it in for "repair".

Now it's been working normally for 36h. Not sure what to do. Sending it to HTC means 2-3 weeks without a phone.

One last annoyance: The IMAP Folders are not well synced. It doesn't detect mails in folders that have subfolders, and if I delete the subfolders, my HTC removes those subfolders from its folders list, but doesn't add the (super-)folder I was hoping to be able to access now that I deleted its subfolders...