How to import Gmail contacts to your phone

[kneighbour]

I want to IMPORT my gmail contacts to my android phones (have several). Note - I do NOT want to sync my contacts - I want to import them. Huge difference.

As I am sure most of you have found, syncing contacts can cause a lot of problems - the most obvious one being you can get a lot of duplicates. You can also stuff up your gmail contacts list, and that is my master.

No - what I want to do is import all of my contacts from gmail. Actually, I would like to import from Outlook 2010, but have given up on that ages ago.

I cannot do a CSV import/export as that does not copy across all the groupings or pictures. I especially want the pictures.

I also have a few devices with android 2.2 and 2.3. I have found that the sync on these devices simply does not work - ever. One of my tablets never syncs - always get a failure.

A decent import app would be great. It would be even better if there was a decent sync app - so that we can sync one way (basically an import), or both ways (as now).

Any suggestions would be appreciated

 

[Rukbat]

You can import, missing data like pictures, or you can sync. Those are your two choices.

MyPhoneExplorer lets you sync using either end as the base. There are probably other apps that do the same thing.

 

[kneighbour]

You can import, missing data like pictures, or you can sync. Those are your two choices.

Well, no, those are not the only two choices. As a programmer who has written software to sync (databases), I can tell you it is fraught with problems. Google obviously has given very little resources to the problem as there are still a lot of problems with it (for a lot of people).

MyPhoneExplorer lets you sync using either end as the base. There are probably other apps that do the same thing.

Perfect!! This seems to be just what I am looking for. My initial tests seems very promising. It seems to sync contacts very well. Much better than what the internal Google sync does at least. Not sure if grouping is maintained. Thank you for your very useful suggestion.