Android 2.2 Froyo - Moving contacts from Phone to Google

Phone: HTC Wildfire
OS: HTC Sense for Android v2.2 Froyo

Confusing contacts system: you can store your contacts in 3 different "accounts" on your phone: in your SIM card account, on your phone's native account, or in your Google account. Only contacts stored in the third list will be synced to your Google Contacts list (used in Gmail), and so really this is where you wanna store all of them.

So what if you already have some contacts in your "phone account"? Maybe you got sent a vCard in a text message and when you clicked it, it automatically got added there without asking (how annoying), or maybe when you first got your phone, you just imported all your old contacts to your phone account without thinking, and now want to move them to your Google account, so they sync.

The best way I have found of moving ALL contacts from your phone account to your Google account is as follows:

1) Save your "phone account" contacts to a file: go into your contacts list (called HTC People on the Wildfire), and do Menu > Import/Export > Export to SD, and select phone account.

Maybe you wanna connect your phone to your PC and backup this file and check it worked properly, as next we will be deleting the contacts from your phone! You can read more about this later in the article.

2) Delete all your phone account contacts: do Menu > View and only select "Phone", then do Menu > Delete, and then Menu > Select All...

3) Import your contacts to your Google account: Menu > Import/Export > Import from SD, then select Google account. If you did step 2, you will need to update your View preferences again to see contacts in your Google account.

Note: If you decided you wanted to backup your contacts file and check it was working, here is some advice:  The file will be stored in your SD card's root directory, with a name like "pcsc_pcsc_00001.vcf". One way to check the file works is to skip step 2, and just import them to your Google account. BUT then each contact is automatically "linked" to the corresponding one on the phone account, and so if you then delete all your phone account contacts, both of them will get deleted, and you will be left with nothing! Of course you then know you are safe to import them again.