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I too miss Palm Desktop for the "all in one-ness" of having PIM bundled together for collection and retrieval of data. Evernote and other feature rich tools are nice, but for reliable ( = simple to set up, use and save) we're still behind what Palm OS had - for bare bones functionality. I don't pretend it was pretty. 
Anyway, I did some contact tests, too, and one thing to look for:
In gmail (web) contacts you will see 2 number representing how many contacts you have. Click on Contacts and notice at the top of the contact list is My Contacts (and the # you have) and at the bottom of the list is All Contacts (and another number). All contacts represent all entries in your Gmail contacts. My Contacts are those contacts that have been added basically to you "frequently used or personal" contact book. It is a special label given to certain contacts through your use of their email or such.
To confirm all contacts in your gmail account are available thru your webOS device, make sure you have added all contacts to MY CONTACTS, by selecting all contacts then clicking Add To My Contacts on the right side of the screen.
Now, go to your webOS device and sync contacts. To confirm all contacts are there, open Contacts > Preferences and Accounts > and the gmail account you want to check (from the account list, not the Default section). Beneath the login section it will show you how many contacts it shows in THIS gmail account. This number should now match the number in your gmial All Contacts list.
The issue with this is that it clutters the contacts list with a lot of extra contacts that I may never need, but the flip side is it throws in some I may not have remembered to add, by the nature of sweeping in those I've exchanged emails with. With Universal Search (such as it is) to find names, I never have to scroll thru my list anyway, so easy enough to just start typing the name and it pops up.
Having said that, not all contact fields are searchable. I can't find notes in contact fields (yet). Not sure if that will change with 2.0 (I'm on Sprint). So you have to label the contact in the way you are most likely to search contacts for it (by name, business or keyword). But if the total # of contacts (by account) matches, you know the info is in there - it is a matter of finding it.
Likned accounts can also "hide" an entry. Again, if the contact totals match what you see in the web, you know the info is there, but it may be a linked account (that you did intentionally or by mistake) and hiding under another similar name. One thing I noticed today is that when I linked accounts, it "hid" the test account I was looking for because it was no longer listed by the name I was looking for.
The complexity can be illustrated by this simple test I did yesterday and today:
I entered a contact in gmail that was similar to one I had in my exchange account. I synced, but the contact never showed up. I got busy and left before resoling it. In the meantime, at some point yesterday I'd merged my test entry with another similar entry in my gmail web account.
Today, I checked my Pre and still didn't see the contact. After adding all contacts to My Contacts, I synced again. This time I also entered in my gmail contacts password (I'd changed it recently and not sure if I'd ever updated the contacts password, although I knew I'd updated the email pw for the same account) and synced again.
When I'd entered the updated contact password AND synced, now the new test account, which I'd merged with another exchange contact, showed up but under the primary profile of the exchange contact. Only when I opened that contact up was I able to see the same "contact" as I saw in gmail web.
As confusing as that all is, remember: when you change your email account password, you have to change the password in all three places for the webSO device: mail, contacts, calendar. I didn't test calendar on this, but it seemed to be the issue for the contact updating.
I'm still not crazy about using gmail contacts as my Palm Desktop replacement, but I haven't found anything else that allows me to remain portable (to move from webos to another format, if needed) w/o having to have my own server set up.
In a rush, but I hope helps explain some of the messiness going on with contacts. This is why I suggested seeing what you did that worked or didn't work, because there are a lot of places where how you handle things can make a big difference in what you see. Synergy is handy, but works better when we know limitations, pitfalls, etc.
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