Bryan Dennstedt

Woah, that is cool.

The source of your problem is that, although your phone appears to have only one phone book, Android actually has multiple phone books under the covers. When you create a new entry, you have the option to select the phone book you want the entry to set the “Contact Type”  to “Google” rather than “Phone” if you want the entries to be sync’ed with Google Contacts. Android gives a warning when you change to Google that some fields will not be available—but puts the entry into the phone book that gets sync’ed with GMail. 

The next question is how to get old contacts that you might have created in your Phone address book over to GMail. To do that, you need to export them from the Phone address book (from inside your Contact list: Menu—Import/Export—Export to SD Card—Phone) and then import them back into the Google address book (from inside your Contact list: Menu—Import/Export—Import from SD Card—Google). The nuisance is that once you’ve done that, you’ll have two entries for each of those contacts. If you were going to stay on the same phone, you would to manually go through your contacts list and, for each duplicate entry, delete the one that says it is a Phone entry at the top. It’s a pain—but a one-time exercise if you remember to always enter new contacts as Google contacts from that point forward. Since you’re moving to a new phone, however, your duplicate entries will be left behind when you switch to your upgrade—and simply sync’ing with Google Contacts will bring all your entries forward.