To import contacts into you iPhone and OS X Address Book isn’t immediately obvious, so after figuring it out, thought I’d post it. Many of us have existing contact lists in Gmail, Yahoo! or Address Book on our Macs that we’d like to import into iPhone.
There will probably be simpler, more automated methods, but this is the solution that worked for me.
1) Plug your iPhone into you Mac and go to iTunes. Click “Sync Yahoo! Address Book contacts” and configure. Click picture below to zoom in.
2) Log into your Yahoo! account and go to Contacts. (Sign up for a Yahoo! account if you don’t have one because you’ll need it for this because Apple Address Book only syncs with Yahoo!, not Gmail or any other online accounts except their proprietary MobileMe).
3) From Gmail, import any vCard or CSV files into your contacts list. Yahoo! doesn’t have this feature. You can export vCard or CSV files from Outlook, Palm Desktop and many other programs you may have contacts in. (This will require a Gmail account).
4) From Yahoo! click on “Import your Contacts from other accounts to Yahoo!” From here you can import Gmail, Facebook and other contact lists to Yahoo! When you’re done, you can clean up your contacts with the “Fix duplicate entries” if you like.
5) Next is to simply sync your iPhone in iTunes by clicking the “Sync” button, which you can see in the first picture above.
