DROID Hints: GMAIL Contacts and You

[640k]

In order for your contacts to benefit you, you must take some care in setting up each contact. SMS/MMS will not work the way you want them to, email clients may seem to be vacant and contacts may not sync with Facebook if you don't follow a few simple rules.

1. SMS/MMS: For any SMS/MMS app (stock included), your contact MUST have a MOBILE phone entry. A quick setup of a contact, an import from another device, or a dump from GMAIL may not have set this up properly. If you are unable to send an SMS/MMS message out through the app (type in name, name comes up), you DON'T have a mobile phone entry for that individual.
2. EMAIL: Contacts MUST have an email address for email clients to work. This may seem obvious but it can occasionally be overlooked. If you don't have one, you can't search the contact.
3. FACEBOOK: In order for Facebook to automatically match up to your contacts, they must have identical names. I have a few friends that decided not to use their real names on Facebook, which gave me two entries. To solve this, find one of the entries, edit it and then hit the menu key. Select JOIN and then you can merge that contact with the other, creating one contact.

 

[SwordOfWar]

Nice tip with the join option. I think it will also match up contacts automatically if they have the same email address.

 

[catmcc]

truncate contact list?

Hello-

I'd like to move away from Outlook and just use my Gmail contacts. However, I have a bunch of Outlook contacts which are just e-mail contacts for infrequent communications, etc., that I'd prefer to not see on my droid in the contact list. In a nutshell, I'd like to only see people that I have a need to talk to on my droid, but still just have one contact list with everybody at gmail.com. Is that possible?

Thanks!

 

[Jim 777]

Great thread

 

[deputc26]

Hello-

I'd like to move away from Outlook and just use my Gmail contacts. However, I have a bunch of Outlook contacts which are just e-mail contacts for infrequent communications, etc., that I'd prefer to not see on my droid in the contact list. In a nutshell, I'd like to only see people that I have a need to talk to on my droid, but still just have one contact list with everybody at gmail.com. Is that possible?

Thanks!

Make a starred contacts lidt and don't star those you don't want.

 

[catmcc]

I have a starred contact list which come over onto the droid as "favorites." All the non-starred contacts are also there and include those I want on the droid as well as the e-mail only ones I don't.

 

[Mars]

so how does the whole facebook contacts merge with your droid work? I hear it syncs photos as well right??

 

[bllarkin]

Hello-

I'd like to move away from Outlook and just use my Gmail contacts. However, I have a bunch of Outlook contacts which are just e-mail contacts for infrequent communications, etc., that I'd prefer to not see on my droid in the contact list. In a nutshell, I'd like to only see people that I have a need to talk to on my droid, but still just have one contact list with everybody at gmail.com. Is that possible?

Thanks!

If you add all of your contacts to a certain list in Gmail, then you can go into (on your Droid) Contact > Display Options, then, in your Gmail account, you can uncheck that list to be displayed.

 

[catmcc]

Thanks, Bllarkin. That was the ticket! :icon_ banana:

 

[hiway12]

any solution to this? I have a contact that is husband and wife, Bill and Sue Smith. Each has a separate email but when I email one of them it looks like this:
Bill and Sue Smith <bill@gmail.com>
or like this:
Bill and Sue Smith <sue@gmail.com>
I want:
Bill Smith <bill@gmail.com>
do I have to set two contacts for this couple? it seems to me that Outlook used to handle this just fine with something like 'Display As' or something

 

[bllarkin]

hiway12, you will have to setup 2 accounts. As far as I know, Outlook doesn't do this either. Display As was used to set the way a contact would display, but not a way to "split" a single contact into multiples. I may be wrong, but I've never seen it used in that fashion.

Edit: I just looked at my work Outlook, and I see how you can do the Display As thing, that's pretty slick. Unfortunately, you can't do that in Gmail.