Rating: Android OS recoils in horror at number of deletions
Whilst visiting the recent Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2012, GoMobile News just happened to run into ace Swedish PR lass, Madelene Kornfehl, who tempted us onto the tactel stand within the Swedish pavillion. What we actually wanted to see was an app (which is still in Beta) that allows you to control an Android handset from a web browser. That app is called Reach Beta and is available for free. However, when GoMobile News mentioned why we wanted to try out the application and tactel’s Jonas Andersson pointed at another completely different app – Contact Clean App. We were pleasantly surprised when we road tested it.
Over the years, GoMobile News has got itself into something of a pickle with our contacts book. We created it by migrating from a Nokia addressbook to an Android one.
Incidentally, the solution to that transition is to export all your Nokia contacts as .vcf cards and import them into Gmail’s addressbook.
However, the whole contacts book was riddled with duplicates because we’d merged existing mobile phone records with information imported from the likes of Facebook, Skype and LinkedIn.
CleanApp actually cost us an easily affordable 89 pence (in theUK) and it was money well invested.
The app found in the region of over 300 duplicates. CleanApp automatically merged around 280 records and then suggested just under 30 which it thought could well be duplicates.
In the end, CleanApp managed to reduce the number of records in our addressbook to just over 1,000.
That was when we encountered a very strange bug. It seemed that the Android OS itself couldn’t cope with the amount of requested deletions.
Even though we instructed the OS to make the deletions whilst syncing with Gmail’s own (online) contacts, the handset – a Motorola RAZR i didn’t want to obey.
Eventually by going into setting we did finally get the handset and Gmail to sync. Phew!
& Finally, whilst we are on the subject of namechecks, GoMobile News needs to ‘big up’ Patrick Smith & Kate Gordon from Joshua PR without whom GoMo’s whole trip to MWC wouldn’t have happened.
