A phone is useless without the contact directory. Until a few years ago, when changing mobile phones, the only way to keep the phone book was by saving them on the SIM card, which was impossible, however, if the SIM had become demagnetized or if the mobile phone had been lost.
With modern smartphones, the problem of losing the numbers of the address book no longer exists and you can change your phone from an iPhone to an Android or a Nokia Windows Phone, or replace the old iPhone with a new one keeping the entire address book intact .
As seen in a previous guide, you can synchronize the contacts of an iPhone with iCloud.
Those who use a Mac can then add a new entry in the Contacts application on the MacBook which will automatically be transferred to other iOS devices, and vice versa, as long as they are connected to the same profile.
For those who do not use a MacBook, Google thinks about it, which allows you to synchronize the contacts stored in the phone, keeping them online in a Gmail account from which they can always be recovered.
Until recently, however, the process was rather complicated because it required the use of the Microsoft Exchange protocol, while now that the search giant has activated CardDAV compatibility to its list of protocols, the process is much simpler .
Thanks to this novelty, you can transfer contacts from Gmail to the iPhone address book very easily.
This also means that, whatever mobile phone you use, you can always use Gmail as a means of switching the address book from one to the other in a synchronized way.
The procedure works with any model of iPod, iPad and iPhone, including iPhone 5, with iOS 5 and iOS 6.
The only prerequisites are to have a registered Gmail account, which can also be a Google Apps email, and to have the Gmail application installed on the mobile phone.
Go to the Settings panel on iPhone, select " Contacts ", add a new account and choose Google .
Go " Next " by tapping on the top right and Google contacts will start to be synchronized on the iPhone iOS system.
By opening the Address Book application you can see if the contacts have been correctly imported and then you can make the necessary corrections or cancellations in the case of duplicate contacts.
To do this first, you can first correct duplicate contacts from your computer by opening the address book on the google.com/contacts page and, only then, by performing the import on iPhone.
Returning to the Address Book app on iPhone, tapping the Groups button in the upper left corner, the list of sources to which Google has been added alongside Facebook and iCloud that should already be present opens.
By selecting Google as the default contact list, the newly imported address book will be kept active on the phone.
Any new contacts created through your iOS device will be added to this account.
You can choose the Google email (or any other email) as the default or " Default account " by returning to the "Mail, contacts, calendars" settings.
If you switch from Android to iPhone surely the phone book has already been saved in the Google account so this is the best way.
The procedure on the contrary, that is to export the iPhone contacts to the Gmail address book to save it online and keep it available and always identical on another mobile phone, on Android and on the PC is instead the following.
You need to connect the iPhone to the PC and open iTunes .
Go to the Info tab, put the sign on the Synchronize contacts with: box and choose the Google Contacts option.
Then click on configure ... and put the email address and password to start the backup of the iPhone address book to the Google address book.
If you use iCloud, you can export the address book to a VCard file to be imported then, manually, into Gmail using the import from file.
If you don't want to use iCloud and without iTunes to save the iPhone address book on your computer to keep it locally as a backup and to import it in Gmail you can use a different program like CopyTrans Manager.
