Think of phone contacts and google contacts as two databases that your "Contact" or "People" apps access seamlessly. But, although it presents you with all contacts on the same interface doesn"t mean you can pass contacts over the "frontier" from one DB to the other. As with any DB, exchange of data involves an export/import process.
To answer johnp58's initial request, here's how to extract the phone DB and import it in the google DB on an HTC Desire with the "People" app (all these contacts will then be synced on your google account).
NB: all actions are done from the first app tab called "All"
## Exporting phone DB
- press "Menu" and tap "View"
- you must activate the view of the contacts DB you want to export (here it's Phone) so check only "Phone" and tap "Done"
- you're back in the "All" tab and all the names that you see now are from your phone contacts DB
- press "Menu" again and tap "Import/Export"
- choose "Export to SD card" on the popup that rise
- then choose "Phone" on the new popup
- the next popup then shows you the place and name of the VCF file that will be written, tap "OK"
- once the export is finished, you're back to the "All" tab
## Importing to google DB
- press "Menu" again and tap "Import/Export"
- now choose "Import from SD card" on the popup
- choose "Google" on the new popup
- android then find your previously created VCF file and imports it or guides you to chosing a particular VCF file if you already had some on your SD card (choose import a single vCard file)
## Sticking to google contacts
- press "Menu" and tap "View"
- now to activate only google contacts view (check "Google" and uncheck "Phone")
- also uncheck "Show auto Gmail contacts" or you will keep seeing all people Gmail can find in the addressees of every single email you have in your account (namely the content of the "All Contacts" group in the Google contacts web interface), then tap "Done"
From now on, all you see in the "All" tab are google contacts, that are synced with your google account.
However, next time you create a contact entry from the phone, BE CAREFUL to select "Google" for entry's type or you'd have to do all that export/import thing again just for a few accounts created in the phone DB by mistake (plus it would bring up duplicate entries of your first import, which is really tedious and unpleasant to fix). When the next created account is set as a google one, "People" app normally keeps presenting you with this type of account by default for all future creation.