Preview of new Google Contacts available now
The web page that handles your Google contacts is getting an overhaul sometime in the near future. For the moment you can still access your contacts at contacts.google.com, but if you’re interested in seeing the new updated version you can play with it at contacts.google.com/preview/all.
It should be noted if you go to the preview page you will not get back to the original view of contacts until you close your browser and come back in, so if you’re wanting to contrast and compare pop open the old one first.
The new interface more closely integrates the Calendar, Google+, emails, and has information updated based on when a contact updates their Google profile so if someone changes their phone number and chooses to let you know you’ll just have it in your contacts, no need for the “this is Paul’s new number” text.
You can also see your most recent email conversations with a contact, although Hangouts conversations don’t appear to be included at this point.
There’s additionally a “find duplicates” feature that does very well at merging partial records together for such cases as I have someone as a contact, then add them to my G+ friends. Generally that ends up with two contacts created, this can fix that.
There’s no ETA on when this will get to the mainstream UI. You can access the old and the new simultaneously if you want to do a side by side, although I did have to use two different browsers to accomplish this.
For those who pay for Google’s services (Google Apps for Business), don’t fret – you’re still not included in any of the beta test fun. Nothing’s changed, and paying for Google services still means you’re waiting months to get these features over to Apps for Business, so much like Inbox which would be incredibly useful for business, you’re not going to see it for a long long time, which sucks.
For those who don’t use Google Apps for Business, go and play with it, it’s really a lot better. A picture of the old interface for comparison below:
