Prior to yesterday, he had phone contacts in his mobile, email contacts in gMail, and business contacts (email+phone) in his work Outloook. One of the features and requirements of an Android device is its connection to a Google account. This allows the user to synchronize their selected gMail contacts with their phone. Handy, since this will be the primary tool to manage said contacts.
However, for my friend, this proves to be an issue. You see, he uses Verizon Wireless which gives their users access to an over-the-air backup utility which backups all the phone contacts to Verizon's server. Quite handy with a non-smart phone. Mike made use of this and had all 200+ contacts stored on the server. So naturally, when you start-up your new Droid 2, you expect to connect to the backup server and magically get your 200+ contacts back. Sadly, this didn't happen. The Droid-Verizon connection was able to push only 122 out of 209 records to the phone. Ones that were missed - his sister, his parents. If the service knew any better, these would be deemed of higher importance.
Scouring the web for the answer proved fruitless. Yes, you can connect to Google but it would be first nice to get back the old ones you had. Finally a call to Verizon solved the mystery - Backup Assistant was broken. Broken for the past several days and no expected fix date. Their suggestion, use Google contacts.
Now fortunately, you can export the contacts from Verizon into a CSV (comma-separated variable) format. But then you need to merge that with your Google contacts. I'll spare you the blow by blow. This is not a trivial process especially if you use the time to cull your old phone contacts and current gMail contacts. Using advanced Excel functions like VLookup, Mike was able to create a merged import file of all his contacts. A mass delete of the current contacts and an import using the file finally got him to state he wanted - all old phone contacts are stored in gContacts. Time to finally sync the phone to Google. And voila!
Whew! You might wonder how it seems I have intimate knowledge of all the steps taken. I was there. Four hours of watching, helping, waiting, and not lunching. But it is done. Yay. How do the 'normal' people do this? Maybe they just abandon the tricky methods and go for straight re-entry. Who can say. I hope your Saturday morning was just as fun.
Thanks for reading,
J^3