Yes there have been many threads on the Merging contacts. But I am seeing so many possibilities with it and as many issues with it, that I decided to summarize my thoughts. N900 is great phone when it comes to supporting social services.. be it facebook or twitter or chat services.. gtalk or skype. I have not seen a phone with such thorough an integration and if you are using some service that no one has ever heard of, most probably you will find an add on for it in one of the Extras repositories.

But with this comes the issue of duplicate accounts and the need to merge them. Hermes does a good job of fetching a lot of data from the services, but it does not automate merging multiple accounts. I strongly beleive there should be a simpler way to merge on the phone itself. (syncing with MFE to pc is not good enough).

Currently once you press merge you have a long delay before the selection appears.. but lets say you are merging two 'John Smith' entries.. The merge first selects the first name on the list with 'John' as first name or last name and then you will have to type manually 'John' to navigate to the other Johns on the list. A simple alternative to this have the contacts displayed with a filter for the first name typed in, which the user can edit if required.

The bigger issue is images, I have noticed that the gtalk avatars are much clearer than the facebook chat ones.. but when you merge both you get to choose first name and last name if there is a conflict but no option to choose which image to keep. At times one avator is just a toon while the other is a real image of the person. At that point when you have no way to choose which image to keep, it is frustrating. But I did find an odd workaround. Click the image to bring up the edit contact opions.. click on the image again to change it. Select the same image in the options (yeah the same image) and then click save . Bingo the lost image appears. Have worked over twenty times for me so it should work for you too. Do it again and you will have the other image. Note: sometime change happens only after you click save.

UnMerge and delete has been griped about a lot already, but to make this post complete am just gonna say its as much important to have the ability to unmerge two mistakenly merged ids also the ability to delete without deleting from the server.

Lastly I hope for an app which can make merging much simpler. By looking at which mail id is used for facebook it would be easier to merge it to gmail or other accounts.

Regards Vijay

I, too, echo the need for a dupe remover. I am successfully syncing contacts with Google Apps and then my Mac laptop at home very flawlessly. But I wish it would be more seamless: I have 600 contacts on Google and Mac but 1,200 on the N900. I hoped for Ovi to be the hub of data for me, but that doesn't work yet. If ever.