Contacts Puzzle?

[Sgooter]

I'm using a Sprint GSIIIl. When I open each of my contacts there is field called "Connection" with 1-6 SIM card symbols along with a "Joined" chain link symbol. Does anyone understand what this "Connection" field does? More importantly, I am unable to make edits to any of the Contacts data. When I select the Pencil/Edit button, the contact fields go dark. Can someone help solve this puzzle?

 

[rando991]

I'm using a Sprint GSIIIl. When I open each of my contacts there is field called "Connection" with 1-6 SIM card symbols along with a "Joined" chain link symbol. Does anyone understand what this "Connection" field does? More importantly, I am unable to make edits to any of the Contacts data. When I select the Pencil/Edit button, the contact fields go dark. Can someone help solve this puzzle?

I had exactly the same problem, but I don't know what caused it (I would love to know though). Hopefully you are rooted and have a nandroid backup of your system, because that's the quick fix. I don't know if I tried deleting contacts data before doing that, but if you don't have a backup, that's what I would try to do to restore your contacts. Other than that, you are probably in for a factory reset to fix it. You will have to fix it too, because, while they show up as SIM contacts you can't even edit them on Google from your PC. I doubt you are going to hear any other fixes, as you can search and probably find my old post about this, and all I got was cricket sounds lol! Anyways, you and I are probably the only ones this has happened to.

 

[meyerweb#CB]

I can tell you what the Connection item is for. It's designed so that if you have information on the same contact in multiple places (for example, in your contacts, in twitter, in facebook and G+, you can link , or "connect" them together and see all the information consolidated into one virtual contact on your phone.

If you open a contact, and tap on the row with the chain link, it will open a page with that contact, and a button at the bottom to "Join another contact." Tap that, and you can search all your contacts, select the one you want to link, and then they'll be joined. If you tap the chain link on a contact that is already joined, you'll see all of the individual contacts, and be able to separate them, if you wish.

As for the problem, under the word "connection" should be a symbol that indicates where the contact is coming from (e.g., a "g" for Google, a square shape for Exchange Active Sync, a phone handset if it's locally stored on your phone, etc.) What symbol do you see for your contacts?

 

[Sgooter]

Thanks for the explanation about the Connection field. The symbols in my Connection field look like a SIM card or an SD card and for any given contact there may be 1 to 6 of these symbols, and most of my contacts also reside on my company's Outlook exchange server. So, I now suspect I have a syncing puzzle on my hands, and my inabilty to edit contacts in my phone's Contacts app may be caused by the syncing permissions (for security) on my company's exchange server, which probably is set for 1-way syncing from my Outlook contacts to my phone's contacts but not the reverse. That said, this is a new restriction, since I could routinely make edits just last week. Make sense?

 

[meyerweb#CB]

It wouldn't hurt to check with your company tech support, but I've always been able to edit my outlook based contacts on my phone. And I've never seen the SIM card or SD card icon; that seems strange to see that on a Sprint phone, and you are, I think, the 2nd example of this in recent days. Odd.