New Gmail Contact Features

Google today has informed its users of four new changes to Gmail contacts. Many of you may have seen our article about Google Sync which mentioned contact merge. Nothing had been annoying me more than seeing several copies of "Jeff Jones" on my iPhone only one of which actually contained his phone number. I now have one "Jeff Jones" which contains all of his contact information. To do this, select the contacts you want to merge and then click "Merge these...".

A new addition to contacts is a new group called All Contacts, which, as the name would suggest, is where all of your contacts live and thus a good view for merging duplicate contacts. You can still see suggested contacts by clicking the "View Suggestions" button from My Contacts. From there, you can select frequently emailed contacts to add to My Contacts.

One of my favorite new features is the ability to move contacts out of the My Contacts group especially useful if you're planning to sync your contact list to your phone. Prune the contacts you don't want synced to your phone from My Contacts (click "Groups" and then "Remove from My Contacts"), and they won't get synced.

We've all been telling Google, and they now have apparently listened. Contact searching works much better now that you can search for phone numbers, note fields, and mailing addresses. The days of searching solely by name and email addresses are over!

What do you think of the new Gmail features?