Login to your Gmail account. Make sure you are using the same account as you have setup on your Android phone. If by chance you do not have a Gmail account go ahead and create one, follow this link. Now look to the left side of the google page and click on contacts and then you will see an option for new group, click on new group. In the pop up window fill in the name you want as your new contact label.

For this guide I have used Android but you can choose any name you like. See the image for a visual.

Now click on contacts again and you should see a whole list of people you have had interaction with. As Gmail likes to store information from everyone you have sent an email too, we are now going to clean this up so all the junk you don't want is not on your phone.

You may have noticed that none of your contacts have phone numbers with them, so this is where you need to add any missing info. I know you are probably thinking WOW this seems like a lot of work but trust me it's well worth it once you have this all setup. If you have your contacts in outlook or some other program a quick search will show you how to import you contacts to GMAIL, you can start here.

Once you have all your contacts in GMAIL we can now select the ones you want on your phone. So put a check mark in each contact that you want to be on your phone. Have a look at the picture.

Once all the contacts you want have been checked go ahead and click on the groups drop down. You will see the new group we just created (Android). Now you can leave the My Contacts selected and add a check mark for our new group Android. This will keep a copy in both groups, as for me I moved all my contacts to Android. The reason I did this was for future organization, remeber that GMAIL likes to add anyone you email to the list and over time the default group (My Contacts) can get pretty messy. So by moving the contacts to the Android group now, you will always know that any contact in the default group is not on your phone.

Now that we have Gmail set up lets move to our Android set up.

First things first, make sure you have used the same Gmail account on your Android device, as this is very important with Android 1.6 (donut). The reason for this is with Android 1.6 (donut) you can only use one gmail account. With Android 2.1+ you can setup multiple accounts but I have not yet played with Android 2.1+. So this guide is for Android 1.6 (donut) only. This does not mean it will not work with newer Android builds but some of the Android settings may have changed, and as soon as Sony releases Android 2.1 for my X10 I will update to reflect any changes in the settings.

Go into settings on your phone and tap on Data Synchronization.

Now tap on Select sync application

Select Google as the application to sync with.

Lets now tap on Goggle sync to get into the sync settings.

Look for group synchronization, should be on the bottom. Lets now tap on it.

You will now see the group Android we created earlier, select the android group only and hit OK.

Presto you have now set up your android device to keep all your contacts in sync and available to any working computer. Dosent matter if you add a contact on the phone or in Gmail, they will now be in sync.