IPhone – I don’t want to carry all of the old contacts on the iPhone. How to select which groups to sync with iCloud

I don't know how to get the phone to sync with a different group than My Contacts, or to sync all the contacts, but as long as you aren't using My Contacts for filing now, then you can have every contact in two groups - "My Contacts" for syncing and your chosen group for filing and organization.

You can do this without destroying the rest of your sorting scheme by selecting all contacts in each group in Google Contacts, opening the Groups menu, clicking the checkbox next to My Contacts until it shows up as a solid check mark (not a slash), and then clicking "apply" in the same menu. By selecting the checkbox instead of the name and using Apply, you are telling the UI to add them to My Contacts without moving them; this is a standard bit of Google UI style.

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