How to setup separate email and contacts profiles on a Palm Pre

This guide describes how to setup your Palm Pre to have separate gmail profiles for your phone's contacts and your phone's emails.

This has several advantages.

• Typically email accounts "contacts lists" overflow with random email addresses from people you have never spoken to over the phone in your life. If you use the Palm Pre in the standard way, all of these individuals will be in your contacts list with no phone number, and probably no name, attached to them. Following the steps in this guide will give a clear distinction between your "phone contacts" and your "email contacts."
  
• Using separate accounts for contacts and email provides a simple way to transfer your contacts from another platform to the Palm Pre.
  
• This method, inherently, causes a copy of your "phone contacts" to reside in the gmail cloud providing you with a backup of your contacts that can be easily synced from the Palm Pre to other platforms. You also now have a place to edit your contacts where you can take advantage of a full keyboard and mouse.
  

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1. Create a new gmail account to hold your contacts. Something like firstname.lastname.phone@gmail.com or oldemailaddress.phone@gmail.com would be suitable.
   
2. If you have a contacts on another system that you'd like to transfer over download the appropriate Google Sync program at http://www.google.com/mobile/sync/
   
   • NOTE: At the time of this writing sync applications were available for BlackBerry, iPhone, Nokia, SyncML, and Windows
     
3. Run the Google Sync application using 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. In addition to keeping your email contacts from cluttering up your phone contacts you also have a backup of your contacts on Gmail and you can edit your contacts from within Gmail. The changes will be migrated over to your Palm Pre automagically!