Having switched from an iPhone 4S to a Samsung Note 3, one of the things that is most confusing is the contacts interface. My iOS contacts were simply set to sync with Google as though Google were a Microsoft Exchange server. The phone knew only about contacts with a phone number. My Android phone, however, similarly set to “show only contacts with phone numbers” responds to a search query with, for example, three separate contacts for my friend Jannis (one is the real contact with a phone number; the other two are orphan contacts that have an email address only). Thrown in for good measure are all of the people that I’ve ever exchanged email with whose name or email address contains a subset of the search query.
This makes it very cumbersome to find contacts with a text search.
How about by browsing the list? That’s cumbersome too because I haven’t found any way in Google Contacts to archive an old contact. I can move stuff into an “Obsolete Contacts” group but I haven’t found a way to tell Android not to sync such contacts.
Back in November 2009 I wrote that “Contacts is the weakest part of Gmail and especially a year ago, could best be considered a work in progress.”
Are there obvious features of either Android or Google Contacts that I am missing?
Hi Phil,
Go to https://www.google.com/contacts/ and from the More drop-down button, select Find & merge duplicates… Hopefully that will more or less sort you out.
John: Thanks for the tip. That was helpful. The search feature, at least on this Samsung phone, is still not effective. The first results when searching are from random people that I’ve emailed, for whom there is no phone number associated. The software on the phone does not give any preference to contacts with an associated phone number. I’m not sure if this is a Samsung-proprietary thing or an Android core feature. Either way, it is kind of dumb. If I search for “Jones” wouldn’t it be better to see a first result of someone that I might be able to call instead of someone with the same last name with whom I exchanged email 5 years ago?
On my Nexus 4, only the contacts in the “My Contacts” group at https://www.google.com/contacts/ are shown. Contacts placed in “Other Contacts” do not show up in a search from the dialer’s contact search.
I have had similar problems, I think at least part of the problem is Samsung. To your specific question about archiving contacts…on the PC is easiest…select them and then remove them from the My Contacts group.
Erik: I did that, I think, but they still show up on the phone. And the “Obsolete” folder is underneath My Contacts. Is there in fact any way to create contacts folders that are not underneath “My Contacts”? I just tried creating a “New Group” and it went underneath “My Contacts” as well.
Phil: try _removing_ each of your “Obsolete” from “My Contacts”. Given that they’re in that other group, they should still be present, but they should no longer appear in your search results.
Eric: I just checked the first contact in “Obsolete”. The Google Groups menu shows that it is in “Obsolete” but not in “My Contacts”. So it has already been removed, I think, yet it shows up on my phone with equal status to all other contacts.
Hey philg,
The contacts interface (“People” app) that comes with Samsung devices is really bad. Anyway, you can choose whose contacts to display (eg only those stored at SIM or those sync with Google or… click Menu->Contacts to Display).
In Android all contacts are stored into a sqlite database, and there are 2 fields that identify the source of the contact (for example Google or LinkedIn or Facebook…) The point is that two contacts from different sources, even though they have the same name, will appear twice (because they synchronize with different sources). You can “link” those contacts to appear joined in a display view but in fact they still be two different raw contacts in the database.
I wrote a tiny app to show all the raw contacts and their sources, and you can also delete those contacts you don’t want to keep, even a complete group from one or more sources without needing to delete from the source too (just disable the contacts synchronization for those sources before, or they will re-appear).
This is useful if you synchronized with LinkedIn, for example, and your contacts list is now full of hundreds or thousands of emails you don’t want to have there but you don’t want to delete from the source (LinkedIn) as well.
You can find the app at Google Play (free), look for MiniContacts. It’s very simple.