Follow up with steps to this post is here: Syncing Blackberry and Gmail Contacts Part Two

I complain all the time that there isn’t a decent online contact manager. I like Outlook fine, but it’s not online. At this point, I need something I can get on my home computer, work computer and on my blackberry. Basically web and phone access. Fortunately gmail has been doing some work to their contact manager. It still sucks as far as user interface, but it’s gotten better.

I tried syncing my gmail contacts to my blackberry a few weeks ago with the new syncing option they have. That was a pure disaster. I hit sync and then realized I shouldn’t have, as gmail imported hundreds of addresses into my phone, phone number or not. Now I have like four entries of everyone that was already there and random email addresses of people I hardly know.

Then gmail realized that wasn’t a great idea and let you only sync “My Contacts.” So the past few weeks I’ve been cleaning up “my contacts” so I can sync just the people that should be in my blackberry. Here goes the process.

11:20– Hook Blackberry to PC and run Desktop Manager. I rarely do this and it took me 7 minutes to figure out how to backup my current contacts to a cvs file. Backup is seemless.

Email break

11:45–I got through my gmail contacts again. I try to edit some and it keeps pulling up someone else’s data for the name I chose. Close gmail, try again.

11:52–It’s still doing it. With other contacts, showing the same person’s contact details but only when I click “edit.” In normal view, it’s fine.

12:02–I think it’s finally working correctly. Let’s finish up with My Contacts.

12:05–Still doing it. Going to clean my cache now.

12:20–Didn’t work. I’m done for now.

1:30–Cleaned up Gmail contacts. Not sure what problem was, but I’m ready to import from phone…probably will lead to more cleaning.

1:35–It did. Have to re-do everything.

2:50–Spent the last hour + fixing all my duplicate contacts in Gmail. Ready to syn I think. Prob will end up with duplicates in blackberry now. I am anticipating a mess *sigh*

3:07–It’s still syncing…

3:12–Still syncing, but it’s already added a bunch more duplicates to my Gmail Contacts…the ones I spent the last few hours fixing.

3:17–will fix in gmail again and see what happens upon re-sync. It wouldn’t be as painful if Gmail had a decent contact manager.

3:23–Deleting all BB contacts (they’re already backed up on PC and in gmail) to cut down on duplicates on next sync.

3:40–fixed gmail contacts AGAIN. Re-syncing now.

3:45–Eureka! (I think). I’m going to re-sync again, just to make sure on the next sync, it doesn’t dump all those duplicates back into gmail and blackberry. I made one change in gmail contacts and one change in blackberry to something else. We’ll see if it figures that i want both changes, or dumps one or both of them…

4:02–It screwed it up upon re-sync. I’m really not sure why.

4:16–still says “starting sync”…I think it’s tired of syncing.

Done for now, I’ll update with the results later.