Bizzare as it would seem but the contact sync between my iphone and google is not two way. From google to the iphone works fine but not the other way. The internet seems clogged up with people with the same problem. The calendar sync does work properly both ways but not contacts. At present if I create a contact on google or on my laptop pc (Thunderbird) then that contact appears on all the devices including the iphone. But if I create the contact on the iphone, it never makes it up to google and so never ends up anywhere except on the iphone. You would think that something as fundamental as this would work by now. The problem was compunded in that somewhere recently I had managed to loose a reasonable number of phone numbers. So I booted the laptop from a very old hard disk which contained among other things, an old iphone backup. Restored the iphone and 'lo' there were my contacts but there they stayed.
In order of usefulness (most useless last)
SYNC IN A BLINK App $5
http://www.syncinablink.com/SyncInABlink_Documentation.aspx
This APP claims to be able to sync the iphone with google over the air.
The first time sync does so without deleting the existing contacts on the phone. Finally!.
22 of my 745 contacts came up and I had to manually tell it something or other but the rest were merged automatically. These showed up as a new group on google as 'other'.
So then I tried to move them all to 'my contacts' and that has caused sync in a blink to now show 775 conflicts. I think that what I did on google was a bad thing.
EXCEL CONTACTS APP $3 app
http://download.pandaapp.com/ios-iphone-app/excelcontacts1.8-id6480.html
This worked really well. This app creates an excel file which is downloaded from the iphone. This can be transferred to the computer by two meothods. One method is the via itunes program on my pc and in the other method, the app gives you a url that you type into your web browser and your web browser then connects directly to your phone via your own wifi network and there is a web page with a link to down load the excel spread sheet. Both methods work. It is very reassuring when something just works. So now at least I have my contacts backed up in an excel spread sheet.
MY-FUNAMBOL.COM Free
https://my.funambol.com
This also proports to be some kind of contacts list in the sky. It indeed did manage to extract the contacts from the iphone and has them tucked away in the cloud but I could not work out how to do the connection to google bit. I am sure its there somewhere.
PLAXO www.plaxo.com $60 per year
This is a paid service that proports to be your address book in the sky.
Signed up for a 30 day trial. Dowloaded the iphone client app and ran it. The app instruced me to switch off the in built iphone contacts sync for the exchange account. In doing this, the iphone warned 'are you sure.....this will remove all contacts from your iphone'. Given that that was the exact opposite of what I was trying to do, I stopped that. Read a bit on their web site. Sent a request for help to them and gave up. Better go and terminate the trial before they charge me a months rent.
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