Move phone (device) contacts to google

We, my wife and I, recently upgraded to the Samsung Galaxy S5. She was upgrading from the S4 and noticed that after configuring the device and adding her Google account that nearly all of her contacts had missing phone numbers when we had both expected the Google account sync to have transferred nearly everything over in a transparent manner. It turns out that almost all of the phone numbers on the S4 were being saved locally to the device and not to her associated Google account. You might be able to see this on your phone if you go to a contact and hit the edit icon. Some information will be in the 'Google' tab but the phone number may be in the 'Device' tab.

The Google part of the contact on an S4 (Verizon) showing the email address

The device part of the contact on an S4 (Verizon) showing the phone numbers

This is a real pain because you might have hundreds of contacts with their phone numbers only on your device and you'd like these to automatically transfer to your new device when you add your Google account. There are lots of posts about the same issue on the web but I came across this one that took only seconds to perform and worked very well.

http://forums.androidcentral.com/sprint-epic-4g/123145-move-phone-contacts-google.html says:

"Yeah go to your contacts hit menu then hit the import/export button click export to sd and it will save a copy to your sd card then hit the import/export button again and will ask if u want to import to phone or google and bam they are all on google"

In our case we didn't have an sd card so instead we followed a modified process.

Select "Export to usb device" (oddly enough this saved to an emulated usb device which was actually the S4's internal flash)
Start up the 'My files' application and locate the .vcf file.
Select that file and we were prompted to select which account we wanted to save the contacts to.
Select the google account you'd like to transfer the contacts to.
Wait while it imports hundreds of contacts.
We went to the new device and watched as the missing contact information appeared.

You'll probably end up with some duplicates that you'll have to merge or cleanup but in our case it was a huge time savings vs manually coping each contact.

Comments

Debugging an imprecise bus access fault on a Cortex-M3

This information may apply to other cortex series processors but is written from practical experience with the Cortex-M3. Imprecise bus access faults are ambiguous, as noted by the term "imprecise". Compared to precise bus errors, imprecise errors are much trickier to debug and especially so without a deep understanding of arm processors and assembly language. Imprecise and precise flags are found in the BusFault status register, a byte in the CFSR (Configurable Fault Status Register). BusFault status register bits The definition for imprecise and precise bits is: [2] IMPRECISERR Imprecise data bus error: 0 = no imprecise data bus error 1 = a data bus error has occurred, but the return address in the stack frame is not related to the instruction that caused the error. When the processor sets this bit to 1, it does not write a fault address to the BFAR. This is an asynchronous fault. Therefore, if it is detected when the priority of the current pr

Graco Swing By Me - Battery to AC wall adapter modification

If you have one of these Graco battery powered swings you are probably familiar with the cost of C batteries! The swing takes four of them and they only last a handful of days. I'm not sure if the newer models support being plugged into the wall but ours didn't. If you are a little familiar with electronics and soldering, here is a rough guide on how you can modify yours to plug in! I wasn't sure how exactly to disassemble the swing side where the batteries were. I was able to open up the clamshell a bit but throughout this mod I was unable to determine how to fully separate the pieces. I suspect that there is some kind of a slip plate on the moving arm portion. The two parts of the plastic are assembled and the moving arm portion with the slip plate is slid onto the shaft. Because of the tension in that slip plate it doesn't want to back away, and because of the mechanicals that portion of the assembly doesn't appear accessible in order to free it. I was

Memory efficient queuing of variable length elements

In embedded environments memory can be a critical driver of the design of data structures and containers. Computing resources have been expanding steadily each year but there are still a wide range of systems with far less than a megabyte of memory. On systems with tens of kilobytes of memory, structures are often designed to be compact to maximize data density. Rather than splurging on memory aligned elements that would be faster for the processor to access, a developer will typically use types with minimal sizes based on the known range of values that the element is intending to hold. Fixed sized buffers At my day job a fixed size pool of messages was implemented to hold message data. While this achieved one design goal of using statically allocated buffers, avoiding dynamic allocations that might fail at runtime, it isn't efficient if there is a wide range of message sizes. It isn't efficient because each message uses a message buffer. With small message sizes the buff

Chris M.

Search This Blog