If you are like me, you have a lot of contacts in your Gmail account and you have a decent amount of contacts in your Address Book. But you want to have them merge, play nice and have them all on your iPhone or iPad as well. Dan did a great post about putting your Gmail contacts into your Address Book a while back. While this article may have some similar things in it, I am mainly going to focus on getting the contacts of both Gmail and the Address Book to be more of a universal address book on your iPhone. I know for me, I like to have my Gmail contacts as well as my Address Book contacts on my iPhone. And with the integration of Google and Apple, I can do this, but it does take some house cleaning to make this happen in a manageable way.
The first thing you are going to want to do is cleanup your Gmail contacts. That means get rid of any contacts that you don’t want to merge over and take care of any duplicate contacts. Gmail has created an easy way to take care of duplicates now with their Merge function. All you have to do is click on the contacts you want to merge and then click on the Merge link.
Once these contacts are cleaned up, you can now merge the two contact books. You can use the method that Dan mentions in his post that I referred to earlier. You can also use another method to get the contacts onto your iPhone. First, I sync my iPhone to my computer. Then you are going to want to click on your iPhone in iTunes, then click on the “Info” Tab. From here you will scroll down till you “Sync Address Book Contacts”. Here you will see options for syncing contacts from your Address book, Yahoo, and Google. Check the Google Contacts box and then hit “Configure”. You will then be asked for your Google username and password.
Once you are done setting this up, hit “Sync” again and now your Address Book and your Gmail Contacts will all be on your iPhone. The nice part about this is that any contact that is now added or deleted to either your Address Book or your Gmail Contacts, will now stay in sync with each other. So if I add a contact on my iPhone, the next time I sync up my phone, that contact will now be in my Gmail Contacts. For most this could be a blessing, but for some, I can see how this would make things a little more complicated.
When you are done with this process you are going to want to do some house cleaning in your contacts. You may find that you will have some duplicate contacts that came over from Google, but didn’t merge with your Address Book. The easiest way to clean all this up is to go back to the first step in this process and take care of any duplicates. Then you will want to sync your iPhone again.
Every once in a while you are going to want to clean up your Address Book and Gmail Contacts, by going in and merging duplicates and deleting contacts you no longer need. Otherwise what you will find is that your iPhone contacts list gets really long. Hope this helps you out. Let me know if you have any questions.
for your iPhone.