Skip to main content

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
5 comments
Read more

Travelling on Spirit airlines out of Boston Logan airport? Here are some tips.

I attended CES 2017 in Las Vegas. Booking the trip late I ended up on Spirit airlines. It was both non-stop, making it six hours to Las Vegas from Boston, and affordable, less than $300 for a one way trip compared to around $700 with JetBlue. Here are some tips that might help you when travelling on Spirit from Boston Logan airport. Eat Spirit is located in the B-terminal, gates B-37 and 38, with its own TSA security checkpoint. While it does have restrooms and places to sit the food selection is limited to a single food stand. I'd recommend eating at the Legal C Bar (number 77 in the image below) prior to going through the terminal security checkpoint. The food and service there were great. Drink The water and other drinks are cheaper if you buy them at the food cart rather than on the flight. Seats The seats on Spirit don't recline. They do this to reduce weight, seat cost, seat maintenance costs, and so seats don't impact the free space of other passengers,...
3 comments
Read more

Yocto recipe SRC_URI for a BitBucket / GitHub ssh git repository

This is a particularly geeky post but because Google searches didn't turn up any information I thought it would be helpful to document the issue and solution for others. I was writing  Yocto recipes that pulled from BitBucket git repositories in ssh form and ran into several issues getting a SRC_URI that worked. GitHub uses the same syntax for their ssh repositories. A BitBucket / GitHub git url, in ssh form, looks like: < username >@bitbucket.org:< account name >/< repository name >.git a more concrete example for a git repository in one of my BitBucket accounts looks like: git@bitbucket.org:cmorgan/somerepository.git Yocto recipes can pull from git repositories by setting the SRC_URI variable appropriately. Unfortunately you can't just do: SRC_URI = "git@bitbucket.org:cmorgan/somerepository.git You'll get errors because the Yocto won't know what kind of url this is. You need to specify the protocol for Yocto to k...
2 comments
Read more