contactsdata synchronizationgoogle-synciphoneitunes
when syncing my contacts between my iPhone and itunes/gmail, although i'm warned about how many contacts are going to be added/modified/removed, there's no way for me to know what is actually going on. So this is useless.
I'm currently annoyed by the fact that syncing with itunes will contanstantly remove contact photos from my iphone.
What methods of sync will preserve contact photos and work with google's cloud services?
When I had Snow Leopard I had the Google address book sync enabled and I somehow managed to put a 'sync' icon in the menu bar.
If I remember correctly I added it from the "old" iSync application (unsuccessfully trying to sync with a Samsung phone).
Now in Lion I still have it and it allows me to manually force the update of my Google address book, but I can't find how to obtain it as the iSync app seems to have disappeared.
This article here describes the situation of iSync in more details
use the Gmail template on iOS to have the best Gmail experience on iPhone, use Sparrow to have the best experience on Mac. It will use your Gmail contacts and the one you have on Address Book.
Use iCloud for contact syncing on the Mac and the iPhone. You won't have the contacts on the Gmail webapp, but you can still find them on icloud.com.
Best Answer
The best way is to stop syncing contacts via iTunes and do it all over the air:
After that all your contacts are synced over the air and iTunes will stop syncing those when you attach your iPhone.