Pixelated contacts on Exchange sync’d HTC

I’ve been struggling with getting nice high-res images for my contacts for quite some time. Infact I first had the issue with my Nokia N97 and put it down to something I had no control over. Though I could change the contact’s image on the Desire, as soon as I did a sync with my Exchange server, I would get a crappy low resolution severely compressed image back from the server.

Now on an HTC Desire with a beautiful high resolution screen this just looks terrible.

I’ve spent a couple of hours looking in to the issue and it seems to be related to the limitations that Exchange places on storing image contacts. When you upload the nice high resolution image, Exchange will do its best to reduce the file size and re-compress the image so that it fits what Microsoft deemed a suitable size for a contact’s display picture in Outlook 2007.

Of course this leaves everyone with rather terrible looking images when you receive a call. While the image might look decent enough as you browse through People (mainly due to the tiny image size displayed there), as soon as you receive a call, the contact image is blown up and looks utterly terrible and highly pixelated.

Now, the solution to this isn’t particularly pretty BUT it does work, which is what’s important.

Luckily the People application allows you to have multiple contacts for the same person, all linked together. Your friends may have Facebook accounts, Flickr accounts and an Exchange contact. All of which will deliver you a rather shocking downgraded image when they call. The solution to getting a high res image is to create a Phone contact for that same person. Give the Phone contact the high-res image and link that with the Exchange contact. Once you do that, you can select which image is diplayed for that contact by clicking the linked graphic on the contact’s details screen.

Credit to roland.poland on this thread over at http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4147