Z10 does not sync with Google contacts

Question

I've had my Z10 for about a week and am trying to set it up. I am trying, and failing, to replace an Android device with this phone. I used the easy setup for "Email, calendar, and contacts" to link the phone to my gmail/google account. That account has two-step verification enabled and the setup program duly collected the verification code. All three accounts got set up and populated with the latest from google.
But ..... if I make a change via a web browser on my PC (an up-to-date Arch Linux system), those changes simply don't get picked up by the phone, even with the sync interval set to 5 minutes. This is not a matter of not waiting long enough. It's a matter of sync not working. The phone does pick up new email messages arriving and new calendar entries.
If I try to change the sync interval, after the 'save', I'm told that my login credentials were not correct. After one of those episodes, I deleted the 'contact' account and added a new one, this time using the caldev approach under 'advanced settings'. This behaves the same way (except that it requires an application-specific password from Google, rather than honoring the fact that I'd already supplied a valid two-step code). Contacts get loaded as part of the account setup, but no further sync-ing happens.
I've wasted almost an entire day on this. Googling reveals plenty of other people complaining of the same problem and over a two-year time period. You would think that Blackberry, now the 90-pound weakling in the mobile hardware business, would pay careful attention to making their software work correctly with the largest purveyor of email, calendar and contacts. But they haven't.
It's too bad, because this system has a lot to recommend it (I am a retired computer professional and spent almost 50 years of my life developing software and managing large and small software projects and I am confident that I know good stuff when I see it, and much of this system *is* good). But my primary requirement is that the phone be a good organizational tool and if it ignores changes to my contacts, it's useless to me and I will return it and stick with the less elegant, but more functional Android, unless someone has a bright idea for how to fix this.

Answer 1

Leslie8120 wrote:
donallen wrote:
Well, I tried a workaround: use Link to sync the phone to Outlook. I just want a way to edit contacts with a computer and sync them with the phone, and very occasionally go the other way when circumstances require. You know, like we did with Palms 20 years ago?
What I found was that sync-ing contacts 1 way from device to computer produced no contacts in Outlook. Just utterly frustrated, I called the place where I bought it to try to get some help, they were clueless (and trying to call Blackberry is a waste of time; they won't talk to you unless you have a paid support contract), and so I asked for and got an RMA # and return label.
But still thinking about this, I poked around in the phone and noticed the BBLink accounts for calendar and contacts and thought "can it be that this system, which provides a nicety like Hub, which gives you an integrated, chronological view of *all* your communications -- calls, texts, emails, etc. -- be only sync-ing the BBLink accounts, not the Google accounts?". This is correct, difficult as it is to believe. So I exported my contacts from Google, imported them to Outlook, and did a 1-way sync from the computer to the device, and, mirabile dictu, the contacts showed up in the phone. After about an hour and half. Further synchronizations, done after some cleanup of my contacts were also very slow, though not this slow, since few contacts were actually being transferred in these incremental synchs.
Whoever wrote the synchronization part of Link clearly doesn't understand the concept of complexity of algorithms. (S)he also clearly didn't test this code on a contact data set of any significant size. I have about 1800 contacts. I had about the same number many years ago when I had a Palm that would sync an order of magnitude faster than this Blackberry setup and do so on much slower hardware with a slower communications channel (a serial port). 
I also found that two-way synchronization produced some very odd messages, such as telling me that essentially all the contacts were in conflict. I abandoned the idea very quickly of ever trying a two-way sync (again, standard practice with Palms).
Link is clearly a crock, but I think I've coerced it into doing what I need. I have until the end of January to decide whether to keep the Z10, and as I said in my original post, there's a lot I like about this phone. So I will use that time to see if I really have found a workaround for this ridiculous synchronization weak spot.
Hello, 
I`m glad you figured out a way to do what you need to do. I have red before some other people having issues with BB Link and Outlook. I never used Outlook - I prefer Google account, which for me has worked very well, regardless what phone I use. It is true, it can take some time to sync in everything but for me it never took days as others have said. 
However, once the huge amount of data is synched to your phone, you don`t need to worry about further time consuming synching. 
Are you saying that synching with Google *contacts* works for you? In the sense that after you have the phone loaded up with all your Google contacts, if you make a change to the contacts with a web browser that the change appears in the phone? And vice-versa? Neither of those cases work for me. One wrinkle: I use two-step verification on my Google account. Do you? I am very suspicious that two-step verification is the cause of my issue with contacts synchronization (though, as I said in my original post, email and calendar synch do work).