Getting contacts from old phone into a Google account on Android

I recently decided it was about time to replace my old phone with some new and shiny gizmo. The choice fell on the HTC Desire. It is a very slick device with capabilities and a level of freedom that far exceeds other similar devices I have considered.

I set out to have the contacts from my old phone transferred to the new one and placed in my Google Contacts account so I would have access to them from other devices and on my desktop computers.

In the new phone I had configured my Google account and things seemed to work. Calendar synced along with a few test-contacts I had created online. I then started the work on getting the old contacts imported.

That part was also fairly easy. Activated Bluetooth on both devices and hit the send button. Contacts appeared in the Desire and all seemed well. At least until I discovered that the new contacts were not synchronized to Google.

After some poking around in the menus I discovered that you get to choose where to store a contact when creating one manually. The options were “Phone”, “SIM” and “Google Applications”. When choosing the latter, contacts appeared in the online contacts application.

I checked the imported contacts and found that all the ones I looked at were marked with “Phone”. So, how do you get them moved into the Google account? The interface provided no apparent simple way of doing what I wanted. Going through each and every one and changing where it was stored was simply out of the question.

My solution? Go into the contacts view and choose the “Import / Export” option. There I chose to export to the memorycard. I then deleted all contacts. Again into the “Import / Export” menu, but that time around I chose to import from memorycard. The program asked me where I wanted to save the contacts and I picked “Google Applications”.

When it was done importing the contacts were magically synchronized to my online Google account. Mission accomplished.

Also, this post was written on my new Desire. It does actually work very well. Though a nice old keyboard with solid tactile feedback beats a touchscreen hands down any day. That being said, HTC have done a great job with this phone.