working with contacts....

more smartphone struggles :)

so far, I have copied the contacts from my old phone to my new phone about 3 times now.  Somehow, contacts keep disappearing and I am not totally sure what does it.  I think it has to do with the syncing to the Google account. 

I have tried turning that off, but it still seems to randomly change the number of contacts that I have.  For a while, I would see 3 (or more) different entries on my phone contact from my gmail account, 1 for un-synced phone and another for yahoo, but that seems to have cleared up on it's own (for now).  But the total numbers still seems a bit off.  Unless all the different entries per contact was counting as a different entry??

I have watched my google contacts (with the website) change when I manually tell the phone to sync.  It looks like it brings everything from the phone back into my google account, but doesn't seem to be able to reconcile the duplicates when it does this.  They all come in as 'Other Contacts' even if the same person/number is already in gmail as a co-worker/friend/whatever.  Sometimes the merge gets rid of most of the new ones, but not all. 

My problems could be because I also have a yahoo account in there doing something too -- but I shouldn't be losing things (other than my mind!). I think I have got the contacts sync turned off for yahoo, and maybe for gmail too.  So maybe I will try fixing the contacts on the gmail site, then syncing them again and see what happens.  But right now sync is broken (again!), so I will have to work on this later.

The other thing I seem to have lost (from the phone) is the ability to assign a ringtone to a group of contacts -- I can't even find where in the phone to assign someone to a group!  So I have had to re-assign all the ringtones from all the groups one-by-one.  (That is after I figured out how to add custom ring tones - but that is an entry for another time!)

More of the problem may be that I am unfamiliar with android and smartphones in general, but I do know computers fairly well -- I have had to search for more basic functionality for this phone than I have ever had to do for any other new technology (new laptops, new OSes, new browsers)