I’ve been going through my customer contact list (currently in Google Contacts), and spent some time exporting my MYOB contact list and merging it with my google contacts, in order to get a consistent list.

After having completed the whole process, I eventually realised that google sorts names differently from most people:

Names are assumed to be First/Given name first, then middle name(s), then Last/Surname.

Unfortunately, I only realised this after I had everything sorted…

So my list has names like: Blogs, Joe

But on my WM6.1 smart phone, it results in names Joe, Blogs,

Note the extra comma.

While my Nokia 6220 Classic has names like: Blogs, Joe (but when you look at the contact details, it breaks it down into:

Last Name: Joe

First Name: Blogs,

But there is some good news (for me at least): it actually doesn’t matter much.

A search for something like “joe” or “blogs” on either WM6, Nokia, or Google Contacts, will result in the correct entry being found.

Maybe one day, Google will add the ability to intelligently specify how the name field is to be split.