Android and other phone gossip

[Gavin Scott]

Success! I've managed to bring my contacts storage down from 17MB to 10MB, and have cleared hundreds of pieces of useless data.

From the android forums, it seems the best way to do this - and have a portable, permanent backup of all contacts is to sync via gmail.

It did take a while, but its well worth it.

So - go into the HTC People app, and from the menu you can export contacts in a CSV format to the SD card from each of the areas it stored them - "Phone", "SIM" and "google accounts" (of which you may have more than one, like I do). Each of these will export to a separate CSV file.

Mount the phone as a disc to your PC, and import the CSV into your primary gmail account - an option to import is there in the contacts section of gmail. When that's complete, unmount your phone from the PC.

Once you've imported all of your CSV files, you'll see the totality of your contacts. I had over 1300 showing. I used gmail to "merge and combine duplicates". In a trice that cut the number by 1/3.

From that shortened list I went through and deleted any which didn't contain a phone number (some were only email addresses, and some didn't have any actual data associated), as well as taking the opportunity to purge the numbers of people I've long since forgotten.

I was left with a much more reasonable 300 (approx) contacts - of which some had multiple numbers.

Then - back to the phone, and in the settings > applications > contact storage, I hit "Clear data" to wipe all of the ones stored there.

Next I went into settings > Accounts & Sync > gmail account, and prompted it to "sync now" on the contacts section. That pulled the revised numbers back into the phone over the air. I also resynced my Facebook contacts. These took maybe 10 minutes to pull through.

When I go back into HTC People, I see all of the contacts - some of which had associated with Facebook - others needed the "link" to pull them together, but this was much more manageable to do with a less cluttered list. It took me around half an hour to work my way though and associate the remaining ones to their FB profiles.

All done.

My phone now has a much more workable 30MB of free space, and my contacts list is more manageable and more responsive; and I have all my contacts there in gmail should I lose my handset. Yay!

[Sput]

If you decide to tidy things in that file, just make sure you don't accidentally have excel treat the phone numbers like numbers, lose the 0's off the start of every single one, then save it as CSV so you have to go through manually adding the 0s again.

not that I would have done that...

[Gavin Scott]

If you decide to tidy things in that file, just make sure you don't accidentally have excel treat the phone numbers like numbers, lose the 0's off the start of every single one, then save it as CSV so you have to go through manually adding the 0s again.

not that I would have done that...

Following the steps above you won't have to utilise excel at all - the exported CSV files leave the zeros (and the +44s) intact. All of the data cleanup was done within the contacts interface of gmail.

It does however add dashes - for example, 079-123-45678, but having tested it, this doesn't interfere with dialling or texting. I must admit my heart sunk when I saw this, as I thought I'd have a lot of editing to do - but happily not.

[Nick Harvey]

It does however add dashes - for example, 079-123-45678.

Oh no! Bloomin' American style dashes too!

Three, then three, then five as opposed to the English five then six.

Just out of interest, can you change the dash format?

[Pete]

I was rather tempted to put spaces and brackets into my phone numbers just for decorative purposes but decided against to save time.

I did a similar operation however just saved the contacts to the SD card and then imported them back from the backup on there. Got it back down to 4.6MB which seems much more reasonable.

I try to avoid gmail's hideous contacts system whenever I can tbh as it loves saving things like [email protected] under important contacts.

[Gavin Scott]

It does however add dashes - for example, 079-123-45678.

Oh no! Bloomin' American style dashes too!

Three, then three, then five as opposed to the English five then six.

Just out of interest, can you change the dash format?

Couldn't see any option within gmail to do this, and there was no format option in the phone's own export tool.

I was rather tempted to put spaces and brackets into my phone numbers just for decorative purposes but decided against to save time.

I did a similar operation however just saved the contacts to the SD card and then imported them back from the backup on there. Got it back down to 4.6MB which seems much more reasonable.

I try to avoid gmail's hideous contacts system whenever I can tbh as it loves saving things like [email protected] under important contacts.

When I first edited my contacts, the resultant file size was around 5MB. It swelled to 10MB once I had made all those facebook and twitter associations on the phone.

When I look in contacts on gmail now, those with facebook and twitter have the following information appended in the notes section...

<HTCData><Facebook>id:530233xxx/friendof:544607xxx</Facebook></HTCData>
<HTCData><Facebook>id:530233xxx/friendof:544607xxx</Facebook><Twitter>id:91705xxx/friendof:22640xxx</Twitter></HTCData>
<HTCData><Facebook>id:530233xxx/friendof:544607xxx</Facebook><Twitter>id:91705xxx/friendof:22640xxx</Twitter></HTCData>
<HTCData><Facebook>id:530233xxx/friendof:544607xxx</Facebook><Twitter>id:91705xxx/friendof:22640xxx</Twitter></HTCData>
<HTCData><Twitter>id:91705xxx/friendof:22640xxx</Twitter></HTCData>
<HTCData><Twitter>id:91705xxx/friendof:22640xxx</Twitter></HTCData>
<HTCData><Twitter>id:91705xxx/friendof:22640xxx</Twitter></HTCData>

...so you might find that filesize start to creep up a bit once it adds all the social networking links.

The example shown above is my sister, who has 4 contact numbers, twitter and facebook, hence the multiple entries.

[Pete]

Well my number is after it added them (and I note it added them in a much slicker manner than it did originally). I think it was about 2mb before it synced it all.

[Sput]

If you decide to tidy things in that file, just make sure you don't accidentally have excel treat the phone numbers like numbers, lose the 0's off the start of every single one, then save it as CSV so you have to go through manually adding the 0s again.

not that I would have done that...

Following the steps above you won't have to utilise excel at all - the exported CSV files leave the zeros (and the +44s) intact. All of the data cleanup was done within the contacts interface of gmail.

My mistake? Thinking "oh I can retype everyone's name tidily now I've got it all in a spreadsheet"

[marksi]

Ta for that guys, mine was down to 2MB when I resynced, though it's now crept up to about 5MB, presumably now that it's finished syncing everything.

The Americans presuming we're all American is irritating, but thankfully not too many of my numbers were converted and I've fixed them all, being anal like that.

[Nick Harvey]

Oh, sorry marksi!

Or three, then four, then four for Norn Iron landlines (and various other locations).

[Inspector Sands]

Success! I've managed to bring my contacts storage down from 17MB to 10MB, and have cleared hundreds of pieces of useless data.

From the android forums, it seems the best way to do this - and have a portable, permanent backup of all contacts is to sync via gmail....

Hmmm, how did you put your contacts into the phone when you got it?

The problem with this method for me is that originally I uploaded all my contacts from my old Nokia to Gmail, tidied them up and then synced them into the HTC then added/linked to Facebook contacts. Therefore your method is essentially what I did in the first place

I might give it a try though as it would probably be good to have a clearout (though my contacts storage is only 9MB) but I assume I won't need to export/import as my gmail contacts are all there already and nice and tidy?


Incidently one thing to check if you're short of phone memory is the internet cache, although don't do what I did and 'clear data' as you'll lose passwords, bookmarks, history etc. Also Google Maps now caches maps for offline use. Useful but I haven't yet discovered where it stores them (SD or phone) but they can be cleared too, I imagine they'll build up if used over a wide area