Few years back, copying all contacts to the SIM was the only way of importing contacts onto a new phone. Most of the Smartphone operating systems today have better native support for address book management and synchronization.
On my old HTC Touch(running Windows Mobile), I could easily sync Outlook contacts with the device using ActiveSync. However ActiveSync worked only over a wired cable or via Bluetooth and there was no other wireless way of synchronizing contacts
Blackberry on the other hand has an amazing wireless contact sync feature. There is no separate “Sync” operation triggered by the user !! ; Any updates done on the Blackberry Address book are synced back to Gmail Contacts and same holds good for any updates done on Gmail Contacts.
Follow the below steps to get the perfect wireless contact sync on Blackberry
- The first thing to do is to setup Gmail as the primary store for Address Book. If you are using Outlook or any other contact store, you need to export the contacts to CSV and import them in Gmail
- Gmail also has this nice de-duplicator feature which can be used to eliminate all the duplicate contacts in the address book.
- While setting up the Gmail account on Blackberry, select the “Sync Contacts” option
- It will take a few minutes, before you start seeing all the Gmail contacts on your Blackberry Address book.
- However there is a bug because of which, sync might cause duplicate contacts only on the Blackberry Address book (not on Gmail). To avoid this go to
Address Book -> Options -> General Options and set "Allow Duplicate Names" to "No"
- All contact changes (add/update/delete) done either on device or on Gmail are synced almost immediately.
Some of the frequently asked questions on how to get the contact sync up and going:
What If I have the contacts only on the SIM?
- Import the contacts from SIM to Blackberry Address book. If a contact had multiple phone numbers, this will create multiple contacts on BB Address book.
- Setup Gmail sync (using the above 6 steps)
- Use Gmail de-duplicator to fix all the duplicate contacts which got created during SIM import
- Changes done on Gmail should automatically sync back to the device
What If I have already synced/imported the contacts via Blackberry Desktop Manager
- One way of handling this is to import the contacts into Gmail first, use the Gmail de-duplicator feature and then setup the Gmail contact sync feature.
- Alternatively, you can just go ahead and setup the Gmail sync; If there are duplicates, Gmail should help in merging the duplicate contacts.
Note: Wireless Synchronization can be turned ON or OFF even via the Blackberry Address book options.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I was totally relieved to see the Google Sync app for the BlackBerry. All of my Calendar and Contacts are in there for so long and used to sync beautifully with iPhone and Android. Google didn’t disappoint the BB crowd
Yes there is a Google Sync app- and the calendar sync does work nicely. When I tried last, the contact sync was buggy
The BIS contact sync however works fine (The carries BIS has to be on v2.6 for this support I guess) and it probably also needs the Enhanced Gmail Plugin on BB (its generally pushed by the carrier itself)
The problem (well-documented) with the Google Sync App and BlackBerry is any events you have that recur forever (like a daily reminder to take a pill at 1pm) won’t sync properly. The event syncs, but the reminder does not.
The enhanced Gmail Plugin got a few more things added to it in BIS 3.0, but they say that Calendar sync won’t be until October of 2010
…and you’re very correct about Google Sync and Contacts….just the basic fields sync. It would really be nice if Google Sync did work perfectly…but it’s not going to happen for awhile.
Hi i am using the Gmail Contact Wireless syncronzation with my Bold9700 and its working good, but i want to know if there a way to force the syncronization, becouse i always have to wait almost 2 days.
Or to know when is going to be the next sync.