Moving contacts stored to "Phone" to gmail contacts?

Hi all,

I have had my desire for a while now and realize I haven't been using the android software and it's link with gmail to it's full potential.

I have been saving all my contacts to the phone instead of to my gmail account.  I now want to have them linked to my gmail account but can't figure out how to do this other than re-typing each contact in as a gmail contact (which I don't want, nor have the time to do).

Is there an easy way to change a "stored in phone" contact to a gmail contact?

Thanks.

That's not going to work Spile, if the contacts are entered as Phone contacts they won't ever sync with the gmail account.

The only way to properly import them to a gmail account is via the PC.  For that the contacts need to be in CSV format, which can be done by importing them to a Windows Live Mail account and then exporting them to CSV. 
The problem is getting them from your phone to your PC.  You'd need a way to back them up to the SD card (there are apps for that, but I don't know which ones)

Alternatively you could disable the phone's entire internet connection (very important that you turn it of, or you'll have to sort out a mess of duplicate entries) and manually enter every contact into your Gmail account on the PC while reading them from your phone.  If you don't have too many contacts, that shouldn't take too long.
Once you're done, delete all the contacts on the phone. 
Only after that is done, you can turn on the internet connection again and let the phone sync with your Gmail account.  Then the contacts will appear on the phone as gmail contacts.

Err ... hold on

Do you now have contacts on the phone or not?  With the procedure you mentioned (if it happened in that order), the sync would normally delete the contacts from your gmail account instead of syncing them to your phone.

So much the better then.  Still it's weird that it won't sync anymore.  I think this is more of a gmail-related or android-related issue, so maybe someone at XDA or the Android forums will know more about it. 
As much as I'd like to solve this without leaving this forum, I'm afraid my knowledge has bounds and this is well beyond those.  So I'd suggest asking it there.

No worries about the rules.  We'd rather see people being happy with solutions that came from elsewhere than seeing them miserable because they can't find one here at all.
As long as the poster of the original message on the Android forums doesn't complain, I won't mind.  If he does complain however, I'll remove it immediately and see how we can put it back up without problems. 

So either way it would land on my head, not yours.