Joining Contacts has no effect (SG3 4.1.1) I just switched from the SG2 to the SG3. They transferred all my contacts at the store.

I now have a lot of duplicate contacts, some of which are Phone contacts and some of which are Google contacts. I am working to clean this up.

On my old SG2, joining contacts did what I desired: 2 contacts would become 1 with all of the information from contact A and contact B 'joined' together.

On my new SG3, when I join contacts, I get a message saying 'Contact Joined', but there is no visible effect. No additional data is added, no additional joined contact is present, and when I browse through my contacts, both copies of the contact are still present.

What am I missing?

There are similar questions such as Merging duplicate contacts - is my phone broken?. My question seems very similar, but no one sufficiently answered the poster's original question in my view.

It might be a good idea to start over, but I would need a way of separating out the Phone and Google contacts when I export. Thoughts on that point?

Thanks.
After much searching for an answer, I found this in another forum.

I use Companionlink to sync my old Palm Desktop database to my S3. The contact records come into the device showing as a phone record, but most times don't auto join to Facebook and LinkedIn records...even if the names match exactly. I tried in vain on many records to join contacts by clicking on a contact then selecting the paperclip icon to join contacts. I would go through the motions and join the contacts, and get a confirmation that contacts were joined, even though it never actually happened. This solution below works! It appears that the 'main' way of getting this done (at least with Jelly Bean) has a programming flaw. Hopefully it will be fixed when Key Lime Pie comes out. In the interim, use this solution below.

Do this:


Open the settings for one of the contacts (click on the "pencil" while viewing the contact)
Put the cursor at the end of the contacts last name, like you're changing their name, and type a space (hit space bar) then it will bring up other similar contacts below. Choose the account you want join by touching it and the phone will prompt you to join contacts. 


This method has not failed!