Has anyone found a solution to the fact that the contact photos look bad and pixilatted. Cheers
Its a sync issue, there is no fix unfortunately as yet. Hopefully google will sort the issue with their wireless sync, but im not holding my breath. I have put the contacts on my phone then disabled syncing of them. Then I update the photos and its fine.
Hmm...intersting....could you explain how you fixed it in a bit more detail ( I ain't too bright ).
I didn't try to sync them at all...they are all images I've taken with the Hero's phone, at max quality. If anyone calls me and the image comes up - quite frankly it look embarassing
cheers
Are we sure its not the Hero doing a really bad job of compressing them before they leave the handset on their merry way across the internet to GoogleMail ?
I hope so, as this means HTC can do a better job on the thumbnails and make them small enough for syncing.
I synced my contact photo's via Exchange, and they are blurry as well.
So its an HTC bug then. Well at least to stands more chance of it being fixed Can't see Google nor Microsoft fixing their end for HTC.
Just out of interest, is there anyone here who is NOT experiencing this problem?
I have emailed HTC tech support - will post back when I hear back from them.
I haven't experienced pixelated contact photos, only the problem with photos not getting displayed off of Facebook.
So when someone calls you Woobit - you see their contact photo sharp and clear?
Interesting - were they photos taken with your phone or ones you uploaded. Anything specific about them or how you assigned them to your contacts?
cheers
The pics from Facebook on my hero are fine (a little grainier perhaps) its ones from my photo album from imported DSLR images that look awful post syncing.
joemax said:
The pics from Facebook on my hero are fine (a little grainier perhaps) its ones from my photo album from imported DSLR images that look awful post syncing.
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We are talking about the contact photo which appears when he or she is calling you, or vice versa. How about you?
Well as these images are sourced from either Facebook automatically or hand picked from your photo albums... yes
Images Facebook has provided are of a dramatically better quality than those hand picked from the Albums application when seen in the Phone application (when called or you call).
It appears that once the Hero has synced to Googlemail, the Album sourced 'call' photo will be reduced to looking awful. HTC or Android is munching them up.
The Facebook ones stay pretty clean.
Ok, heres whats happening with me, and this happened on all devices I have used, HTC Touch HD, HTC Touch Pro2, Diamond etc and also the Hero.
Say you have all your contacts initially downloaded from Google and synced with your phone. They all come down, so turn sync off as not needed for contacts anymore.
Link your contacts to Facebook, images all come down, work fine.
1 week later, they are still all fine, good quality, can see the pic when calling.
Now, sync again with Google or Outlook and it sends the pics to the server or to outlook, but then it sends them back to the phone (I presume because the phone thinks they have changed in some way).
When they come back, they are grainy and rubbish, so this is something to do with the sync.
Try it, turn off all syncs and replace some pics with decent pics and they will stay that way, unitil you sync.
Just tried that Nice-Lad.
Turned off all syncing. The re-assigned an image to my contact ( my home phone ). Called myself from my homephone - and the new image popped up looking totally crap as before
BUT... the whole point of syncing as that you can add contacts, calendar events etc on your computer and have them automagically appear on your phone.
Turning it off is a work around 'maybe' but makes contact and event management useless.
HTC need to keep a local cache of images and use these in preference to those it gets back from Google (seemingly messed up by HTC before sending to Google). Facebook ones dynamically change when ever a friend updates their profile picture... these appear not to be affected by the same degree.
J-Zeus said:
Just tried that Nice-Lad.
Turned off all syncing. The re-assigned an image to my contact ( my home phone ). Called myself from my homephone - and the new image popped up looking totally crap as before
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Ok, it may be as its stored in the cache so won't change. Or, try changing to WIFI and re-assign a totally different image. Could be the mobile network downloading the image with network compression...?
joemax said:
BUT... the whole point of syncing as that you can add contacts, calendar events etc on your computer and have them automagically appear on your phone.
Turning it off is a work around 'maybe' but makes contact and event management useless.
HTC need to keep a local cache of images and use these in preference to those it gets back from Google (seemingly messed up by HTC before sending to Google). Facebook ones dynamically change when ever a friend updates their profile picture... these appear not to be affected by the same degree.
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Click to collapse
Oh yeah, I never said it was ideal, I was just pointing out that its an issue with the Syncing. My contacts are now fine, but I know what you mean when you change a contact, you want it to update in Google or Outlook.
It is very annoying and always has been, it needs fixing. Google are aware of it, I posted a comment on their forum and someone said they were looking at it, but that doesn't usually mean anything.
Would not be as noticable if we didn't have full screen caller display.
My N85 had a nearly as large an image for callers... never a problem on that... I synced with iSync over Bluetooth and
All HTC need to do to get around this is to keep a local copy of each thumbnail and ignore what Google sends back or is created to send to Google... which ever is the case causing the issue.
As a side note... I've noticed all my Facebook contacts that are also in my Mac Address book and therefore in Google contacts (I use Spanning Sync to mediate between all three) have a line of code in the Note section.
Appears that the Hero 'tags' these contacts and inserts the data into the Note field. Both in Google Contacts as well as passing through to my Mac AddressBook.
Like this...
<sn>id:578756042/friendof:706653099</sn>
But only if they have a Facebook profile picture that the Hero has downloaded. Some contacts that must have a privacy setting set in their Facebook profile, have no picture and this no line of code.
Anyone else notice this ?
J-Zeus said:
So when someone calls you Woobit - you see their contact photo sharp and clear?
Interesting - were they photos taken with your phone or ones you uploaded. Anything specific about them or how you assigned them to your contacts?
cheers
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Usually I don't really look at the picture when someone calls me, too busy answering I just had my gf call me so I could study the caller pic, and yeah, it could be better. The picture is synced from her Facebook account, and it taken with a not too expensive cell phone so the picture wasn't too sharp from the get go.
Basiclly: quality could be better, but I find the missing contact pictures more of a problem
woobit, try going to the Albums app and hitting the Facebook tab, mine earlier today (not tried before) grabbed a whole load of Facebook profile pictures that were not grabbed by the People app and its Groups tab.
Also, I think those friends with certain privacy settings will not allow their profile picture outside of Facebook.
I have a few missing but far more than I had prior to using Albums.
Worth a go
UPDATE:
Well I gave up with HTC email support, as they couldn't get their head around the fact that it is NOT a camera issue.
So I rang them, and the chap I spoke to was less then helpful - basically telling me there was no fix, he didn't know if they were working on a fix, and that it was all Google/Androids fault*
He seemed to think the problem was that when you assign an image to a contact, they phone makes a tiny thumbnail that is assigned to the contacts info page ( what you see when you view their details. Then, when that contact rings the phone tries to enlarge the very small image that you see in the contact page - thereby it is pixilated to look at.
Is this a problem with other Android phones? And surely to Christ someone in quality control s supposed to pick up these ( glaring ) errors?!
* This becomes somewhat of a pattern - each blaming the other so they don't have to take responsibility and actually do something.
I added a new contact today (time warner) and I noticed that I had options to save the number as company main, car, radio, assistant as well as the usual home, work, etc..
When I go to edit an existing contact these new (to me anyhow) options are not there.
Is there a way to get them there?
I think it may be handy to be able to save company numbers in their own category and I already have quite a few saved as contacts
Looks like it depends on the type of contact that you save it as. Exchange provides all the options. Google has most and the phone even less. Least options is the SIM.
Where are you saving them to?
I just looked and the time warner contact says phone and some others say google. So I guess that explains it.
Thanks
Hi,
firstly, let me introduce myself:
My name is Tony and from my signature and amount of posts, you can see, I am a very active XDA user and used to do a lot of first and second level support for the blueangel and the blackstone and today my SGS2 arrived, which is my first native android phone. As soon, as i figured out all the tiny beginner's questions, i will start supporting this awesome device for all you fellow users out there.
But for now, excuse me, that I have to ask a few stupid questions that I encountered while setting up the device:
1. My phone is set to English (US) and my keyboard and voice input options are set to German (so that writing or voice inputting sms and german addresses are easier). However, Vlingo does not exactly support the dual language and sometimes produces problems when reading out english information, anybody else experiencing mixed language problems there? any advice?
2. i decided to set my up contacts from scratch. i put in all the correct formal names for my contacts, but when i connect these users to their respective facebook accounts (who are sometimes based on nicknames), the display name automatically changes to the facebook name, while i prefer the formal name. is there a way to change it?
3. contacts allow me to add several im accounts, e.g. ICQ. when i click the icq# of a user, it opens up im and states that only windows live, google talk and yahoo are supported. is there a way to either connect that to the official icq for android, or add other messengers to the stock im? if not, why bother inputting all the information, if one cannot use it?
i wonder why nobody else seems to experience problem #2.
i found it again here: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6067
apparently, when you connect contacts through one or more platforms, like facebook, twitter, last.fm, skype... and there names vary, your contacts app will always prefer the last name with the latest letter in the alphabet. in my case, there is one contact first name r. last name b., but one facebook, he goes by another variation of his name, "zu b.", so contacts prefers the facebook name, as z is greater than b. there is no logical reason why facebook names should be preferred to the phone's own stored name. after all, i entered those names because i wanted to find the contacts by that name. why does the phone tell me, my choices are no good and facebook's are better?
strike issue #1 and #3, i will find a workaround some time, but it would be extremely nice, if someone could check if this contacts issue is present in their device and firmware?
i have ke7 dbt (latest german stock rom).
My nexus one does the same thing. If I sync contacts with Facebook it changes to their Facebook displayed name. I'm still not clear on exactly how it does it too.
i tried several ways of bypassing the issue, starting by assuming the sorting of contacts would be determined by the regular ascii order of letters, or linux's, so i tried renaming every contact to minuscules, so R.B. -> r.b. which didn't help and i wouldn't even bother starting any contact with z or any symbol, as that would render the letter navigation bar on the right useless.
so the only way i could bypass the issue was to sort and display contacts by first name. after many years of windows mobile use i'm having trouble getting used to it but apparently, there is no other way so far.
if anyone else has trouble with this, please go to http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=6067 and star the issue and post your experiences.
Anyone know how to control when syncing contact in our phone with google account? I mean can choose which data in google or in our phone is priority.
Ex: If I edit contact in both my phone and google (use computer) but only one is edited correct so how can choose which data will be replace by the other?
Add a letter to the name of an individual edit and give it a little time if you see a same name with an extra letter in your emai or on the phone then try it the other way around. (Ex. make a copy of one contact with a phone number in your email and add a number or a few letters off from the original name then wait and see what updates! Then do the same thing from your phone make a copy contact with a slightly different name and see if it is in your gmail! I don't believe you can modify WHAT gets synced persay but you can completely turn sync off until you are ready to back your items up which in turn also saves on battery life as well.
So, I am looking for a way to automatically add the date and time to contact entries that I enter on my phone. Whether this is by an app, or by some third party or something. My problem is, that I have a bunch of contacts, that I don't know when they were added or who they are (lots of long nights). While I am sure it may be hard or impossible to retroactively do this, I want to find a way to do this in the future.
I am not sure if this would be able to be done by an xposed module, (take the date and time and add it into the description field) or if there is a third party contact manager that would be able to automatically save to my Google account.
Does anyone know of something like this? Or any trusted third party contact managers that may be modular, or extensible.