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What happened to my contacts?

Madwand

Newbie
Just got my Infuse and the salesperson copied my contacts or synced them with gmail or something, I have no idea. But now I hae way more than I had on iphone where they were very neatly organized and exactly how I wanted them. Now they are all duplicated, some have Gs by them, some have Fs by them, some have little SDcards by them. The ones with the SDcards seem to be useless and have no phone numbers, so I suspect I can delete them cause they are just dups of real contacts I had on my iphone. What is this mess? Some of them I was able to join with each other, others I have just deleted cause all they were was email addresses that were in the real contact with a fone number. How do you clean this mess up?

Even worse now is an instance where my work number is gone. It was on there as just one number instead of the 3 it was before. so I hit the plus sign and added the two more numbers and saved and now it is nowhere to be found in the list. It still shows up in history, but wont show in the list. I even added it two more times and saved it and it still wont show. WHY NOT?? I do not like this social media type syncing mess. It used to be a nice clean fone book, now it's a messed up contact list...
 
While in your contact list tap menu-view just uncheck whatever you don't want to show.
G=google
F=facebook
SD card is actually a sim card where the contacts were originally stored.
 
Under the menu, there is no view. There is a display and that shows something similar to that. It will let me choose only listings with fone numbers. But I don't mind having the EXTRA info from the web contacts. But I want them combined with the legit contacts, not duplicated multiple times.

And this doesn't explain what the SDcard contacts are or where my work contact is and why I can't locate it.
 
I'm not sure what happened to your work contact I have never had a contact just disappear.

For the sdcard I would think that since its a new phone that there wouldn't be any contacts saved to the sd card only the sim card.

And once those contacts where imported from the sim card it copied to the phone creating the duplicate contacts. And then listing the google contacts and facebook contacts without linking them to their matching contact information like phone number. So if you had a phone contact and they also had a fb and google contact you would see 4 contacts for this one person (sim, phone, fb, google) whereas if it was linked it would be 2 contacts sim and phone with fb and google attached to it. Then you would be able to just uncheck the sim contacts to make lost go away.

If you tap on a contact and edit does it give you the option to link them?
 
You don't explain where/how your contacts were stored in the first place. If I was you I'd take the phone back to the shop and get the salesperson to do the job again, but this time explain how he is doing it.

Dave
 
My contacts were stored on my iPhone in the first place. I did explain that in my first message. In the second sentence.
 
My contacts were stored on my iPhone in the first place. I did explain that in my first message. In the second sentence.

Doh!!! I must learn to read properly .... :o

Have you got a "clean" copy of your contacts anywhere? You mention the iPhone, doesn't iTunes back them up for you? From there can you sync with Google/Outlook/Thunderbird maybe then sync with the phone?

Dave
 
Yeah, all this synching mess is what's started the problem in the first place. Now all my contacts have little gs and sd cards and fs and all kinds of garbage on them that they never had before. And now every time I send a email, that person shows up in my contacts. Now that's just asinine. I don't want to save every person I ever email...
 
yea the same crap happened with me... royal pain in the ass to be honest and really no excuse for this to happen... ive searched high and low for a contact app to clean up the duplicates or combine everything... not everyone wants to empty everything into google... i for one dont really care much for google... yes ive got an android...

anyone got any idea's...
 
As said already it's all about linking and views. . ... think of it like your PC pulling together all and any online address books you have (work, home etc) and putting them together in one place without merging them. There is a phone specific forum further down the android forums page.. if you post there another user of the same phone will be able to tell you how merge specifically for your phone. It's quite simple once someone talks you through it but a slightly different process for different brands of phone.
 
To be honest, if you have multiple places for contacts I'd amalgamate them all into one place first, before syncing them to the phone. Whether that's Outlook or Thunderbird or something on a pc or Google out in the cloud. Whatever it is I'd go through all my contacts manually and clean them up. Make sure the addresses are all there. Make sure the phone numbers are complete and consistent. Make sure names are complete.

You'll thank me for it sooner rather than later. Beer tokens accepted in pounds sterling .... :D

Dave
 
Blame facebook :)

They wont let contacts be exported properly so they can be all synced up nice with Gmail. Gmail has an excellent interface for combining dupes too.

They will let you import contacts, but not export.
 
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