How do I REALLY sync ALL contacts to a new phone

Question

I have an old phone (LG P350) with Android 2.2.2, where I obviously have a few contacts. Most of them are contacts with telephone numbers, which I manually created (few got automatically imported from facebook or email).

Now I have a new LG phone with Android 2.3.6. I want to have on the new phone all the contacts I had on the old one. I mean the contacts that you see when you tap on the Contacts icon.

It should be a complete no-brainer, but apparently it isn't.

Note: I don't use the GMail application neither on the old phone nor the new one, and I don't want to. I do have my @gmail.com account set as the main account for both phones.

On both the old and new phone, under Settings -> Accounts and Sync, the "Auto-sync" option is enabled. Also, under the [email protected] account listed below "manage accounts", I have enabled both "Sync people details" and "Sync contacts", both on the new and old phone.

However, my contacts don't get synced. I have a lot of contacts in the old phone that I can't find in the new one. The new phone apparently has imported all the mess of useless contacts from gmail (i.e. email addresses some with and some without names) but no phone numbers.

So how do I sync, or export and then import ALL my contacts?

Answer 1

As you've already figured, a built-in solution is:

• Open the contacts app on the "old device"
• In Menu → Import/Export, chose to export
• Copy the resulting 0001.vcf file to your "new device"
• On the new device, open the contacts app and chose to "import" from Menu → Import/Export

Hint: take care there's enough free space available on the "exporting" device (file might get large, as contact pictures are stored inside it as well). You might not always get a warning when storage runs full, but instead end up with some "incomplete export", which then cannot be imported on the other end.

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Now for the second part: why didn't they sync automatically? First, there are a few different "storages" to be considered:

• On SIM
• Google Contacts

These two are available on all devices. Depending on device and ROM, there might be additional "storages", e.g.

• Exchange
• PC Suite

Assuming you're speaking of Google's sync: That only takes care for Google contacts. As the PC Suite would only cater contacts in PC Suite to sync them with its desktop counterpart, and Exchange would not care for anything but Exchange contacts (you wouldn't want your personal contacts appearing in your company's address books, would you?). SIM contacts are a very special case: Nothing cares to sync them anywhere. I'm not even sure whether Import/Export is touching them.

So as parts of your contacts have been stored as "LG PC Suite contacts", these have not been sync'd with Google (and your "Google contacts" not with LG Suite), which explains the miss.