Google Contacts, otherwise known as my first big issue with the Palm Pre Plus, and a simple fix

The folks at Verizon Wireless were kind enough to send me a Palm Pre Plus and a Palm Pixi Plus to play with for a little while. And because of them sending out a few review units, I will in-turn be able to offer some hands-on posts about my use and experience as well as answer any questions that you may have.

That said, being a Google fanboy user, the first thing that I did upon receiving the phones were to install gDial Pro (a Google Voice app), and login to my Gmail account. With that Google login I should have had access to my email, calendar entries and contacts. Well, the first two items worked like a charm, but the contacts were an issue.

After a little use, I noticed ‘some’ of my contacts were missing, so I went into the Contacts app on the Pre Plus and hit up the Preferences section. From there you can click on your Google account and it will tell you the number of contacts you have synced with your phone. Mine said 47 — wrong, incorrect, not even close.

I should have had 155 total. So I tried a few things — mostly the obvious. I deleted the contacts from my phone and tried to resync. Still 47 and nothing more.

I did a few Google searches and found that I am not the only person having this issue. And most searches said the same thing, either delete and resync or fix your contacts to not include certain characters. Not willing to go through 155 contacts and “fix” them, I continued to look thinking there had to be a better (simpler) answer.

It turns out there was a simple fix, which I found on the Palm Support Community website. Here are the details;

• Go to Google Contacts (on the web) and go to your “My Contacts” group.
• Once there, do a Select: all, and then a Remove from…My Contacts
• Then grab your Pre and resync that account. This should bring the contacts on your Pre down to 0.
• Then go back to Google Contacts (on the web) and add the contacts that you want to sync back into your My Contacts section.
• Then grab your Pre and resync those contacts again. This should bring the contacts on your Pre to match the amount in the My Contacts section on the web.

After that, I had, and still have my 155 contacts on the Palm Pre Plus. Big issue, simple fix. Of course, I would highly suggest that you make sure your data is backed up before making any big changes, just in case.