On my Android phone* I have three sets of contacts: the SIM card, the phone itself, and Google(R). Can someone explain how all of these interact with each other?

My previous phone was a park-it-pc with win-doze 6.1. I had all of my contacts on SIM, the phone, and whatever ActiveSync does. When I got my 'droid, I simply moved the SIM card and started using the phone. Now my contacts are all messed up as viewed at the phone.

Also, I can copy SIM contacts to the phone and edit contacts only to have then vanish when I touch SAVE.

Within the contacts app, I have the settings such that all of SIM and PHONE and GOOGLE contacts display when I look at the address book.

One more thing:
I'm not worried that I have "lost" contacts because I have this ActiveSync copy over on the win-doze side. Can anyone tell me how to export those contacts over there, move them to my $HOME somehow, and then import them to my 'droid or to Google?

Thoroughly confused!!!
~~~ 0;-Dan

If your Android acts like my T-Mobile Android G1, it required you to create a Google account upon startup.

Contacts that you move from the SIM to the phone get saved as Google contacts. You can log into mail.google.com and edit them there. They are saved in the Google cloud. This served me well when I had to replace my phone for a warranty issue (Stuff breaks--T-Mobile handled it like a champ--they gave me a replacement phone until the new one arrived, and I had the new Android in two days).

I can't say that I have noticed any irregularities in the appearance of the SIM card contacts, as opposed to the Phone contacts, in my phone, but I don't pay too much attention to appearances as long as stuff works.

My contacts all seem to have a large number of "linked numbers" (or some name like that).
Sometimes there are two or three Google(tm) and three or more "phone" or "sim" contacts.
Where did all that come from. Is this linking done automatically by the contacts app?
(Several folks share a home or biz number with separate mobile numbers; a biz also links
with the various and several folks that work there... etc)

How did pic-A get scrambled to number-B and name-C? Any ideas?

If I edit at google mail, when and how do these get sync'd with the "phone" contacts?
(I can set the phone to show the google contacts directly.)

~~~ 0;-Dan

Maybe this will help:

http://lifehacker.com/5499575/the-co...oogle-contacts

I haven't encountered any screwy linking because I hardly use gmail and don't use any other google service except for the calendar.

I saw this today; it may be related:

Google turns off GMail data feed to sites like Facebook