Keep your Pre contacts and your gmail contacts Seperate
While still retaining gmail access from your phone
This is by no means rocket science, but I thought it might help others use their Pre the way they want. My girlfriend got a Palm Pre recently (I'm jealous) and
we were looking for an easy way to transfer her numbers from her old Blackberry to the shiny new Pre. I did a little research and found out that both the
Blackberry and the Pre support syncing with Gmail. As we went about this I realized that she wasn't going to want every single random email address that
had made it into her Gmail account to be in her contacts on her cell phone. The following method allows you to have your contact list backed up on Gmail, AND
have gmail accessible from your phone, without polutting your phone's contact list with tons of random email address that you have aquired over the years.
This is the solution we came up with.
1.) Create a new gmail account. We used firstname.lastname.phone@gmail.com (you might also consider oldemailaddress.phone@gmail.com or something else
equally memorable).
2.) Download the Blackberry Sync App from Google: Google Sync for your BlackBerry phone.
3.) Sync your Blackberry with your new *.phone@gmail.com email address.
4.) Add both your original email address and your new *.phone@gmail.com email address to your Palm Pre.
5.) Run the Sync application on your Palm Pre.
6.) Delete your original email address from the Contacts app on your Pre.
7.) Delete your *.phone@gmail.com email address from the Email app on your Pre.
That's it! Now your Pre checks email from your original gmail account and is synced up with the contacts on your new *.phone@gmail.com email account. This has 2 added
bonuses. You have a backup of your contacts on Gmail and you can edit your contacts from within Gmail and the changes will be migrated over to your Palm Pre automagically!