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You are here: MacNN Forums > Hardware - Troubleshooting and Discussion > iPhone, iPad & iPod > iPhone unusable with very large contact list

iPhone unusable with very large contact list
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Atheist
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Aug 26, 2008, 10:12 AM
 
The CEO here at work has a ginormous Contact List in Outlook (around 20,000) contacts. When synced (via ActiveSync) to the iPhone, it is rendered useless. Just replying to an email can prove impossible as it seems to be doing sequential scans of the contact database. It looks like it's not even indexed. How lame is that?

We're now going through gyrations to figure out how to restrict which contacts are synced to the iPhone. No obvious solutions yet.

Ideas anyone?
     
Eug
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Aug 26, 2008, 10:20 AM
 
Ouch. I have only 3-digit numbers of contacts, which is why I don't see the issue. (However, I do get a 1-2 s lag when accessing contacts sometimes.)

Have you sent Apple feedback yet?
     
Atheist  (op)
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Aug 26, 2008, 10:29 AM
 
Yeah... I've sent feedback. I find it troublesome because searching the contact list is a fundamental part of a phone. In the grand scheme of things, 20,000 entries in a list is nothing. A simple index would accommodate instantaneous searching.
     
ajprice
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Aug 26, 2008, 10:30 AM
 
Create a group of 'iPhone Contacts' and only sync that group from his Contact List. You can select groups to sync in the Info pane under Contacts (Outlook does have Groups doesn't it?). This will probably mean manually making a group of the contacts they want on the phone, but it should work. (I'm at work so can't confirm this in the latest iPhone/iTunes software, but it should be there as the pic below -

http://www.mobilecomputermag.co.uk/2...erent-pcs.html (second screenshot down)
( Last edited by ajprice; Aug 26, 2008 at 10:32 AM. Reason: fixing image link)

It'll be much easier if you just comply.
     
CorpITGuy
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Aug 26, 2008, 10:58 AM
 
That's the only major problem we're having here at my company as well.
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." - Winston Churchill

MacBook Pro 17" 2.33 GHz - (mine)
MacBook Pro 15" 1.83 GHz - (wife)
Pair of iPhones
     
Atheist  (op)
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Aug 26, 2008, 10:59 AM
 
Originally Posted by ajprice View Post
Create a group of 'iPhone Contacts' and only sync that group from his Contact List. You can select groups to sync in the Info pane under Contacts (Outlook does have Groups doesn't it?). This will probably mean manually making a group of the contacts they want on the phone, but it should work. (I'm at work so can't confirm this in the latest iPhone/iTunes software, but it should be there as the pic below -

http://www.mobilecomputermag.co.uk/2...erent-pcs.html (second screenshot down)
He is syncing his Contacts via ActiveSync, not via iTunes. From what I can determine, there isn't any way of limiting which contacts are synced. His contacts are split into several different folders but all of them get synced to the phone.
     
Atheist  (op)
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Aug 26, 2008, 12:41 PM
 
Found a workaround. I had to create a new Outlook Data File (PST file) that is stored OFF of the exchange server (in this case, it's on a networked drive that gets backed up). I then moved the majority of his contacts into a series of Contact sub-folders in this new Data File. ActiveSync only syncs those contact folders that are stored on the Exchange server (kinda makes sense.)
Hope this helps anyone else in the same situation.
     
DigitalEl
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Aug 26, 2008, 12:48 PM
 
No disrespect intended... This is a genuine question out of curiosity.

Just what does one do with 20,000 contacts? You can't possibly have any kind of meaningful dialogue with that many people... Maybe if you're on Twitter and it's one way... But a real exchange... With 20,000 contacts? How?
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Atheist  (op)
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Aug 26, 2008, 01:01 PM
 
Since when does one have to have "meaningful dialogue" with everyone in their address book? He's the CEO of a large company and wants the name and contact info of everyone that has every had any type of contact with his company. Which by the way, he does sync the entire list to his Palm and it doesn't seem to have any trouble with 20,000 entries.
     
Nexus5
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Aug 26, 2008, 01:12 PM
 
Originally Posted by Atheist View Post
Since when does one have to have "meaningful dialogue" with everyone in their address book? He's the CEO of a large company and wants the name and contact info of everyone that has every had any type of contact with his company. Which by the way, he does sync the entire list to his Palm and it doesn't seem to have any trouble with 20,000 entries.
In my company are 240.000 people. If my CEO wants to have them in his iPhone we have a problem.

nexus5.
     
Atheist  (op)
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Aug 26, 2008, 01:18 PM
 
Originally Posted by Nexus5 View Post
In my company are 240.000 people. If my CEO wants to have them in his iPhone we have a problem.

nexus5.
No doubt. From what I can gather, just a few thousand contacts cripples the iPhone.
     
Visnaut
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Aug 27, 2008, 12:54 AM
 
WIth just 181 contacts, my recently restored iPhone gets extremely sluggish when I tap the Contacts button. Which it did not do back in the 1.x days, with a similar number of contacts. So it's not like they haven't figured this out before. For some reason they broke it in 2.0.

I wonder how many contacts Steve Jobs has. And which one of them he reamed out when he found out how slow the contact list got in 2.0...
     
Andrew Stephens
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Aug 27, 2008, 03:13 AM
 
Originally Posted by Visnaut View Post
I wonder how many contacts Steve Jobs has. And which one of them he reamed out when he found out how slow the contact list got in 2.0...


I only have around 250 contacts on my phone and the 3 or 4 second delay getting the list to scroll is frustrating on a phone with so much apparent horsepower under the hood. It makes blackberry owning friends laugh.
     
outaru
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Aug 27, 2008, 04:09 AM
 
i have less than 100 contacts, it scrolls like butter but when i use search function i get a lag about 20-50 seconds..

apple should address this issue ASAP... i cant tolerate that evil grin on blackberry users..
     
Big Mac
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Aug 27, 2008, 04:31 AM
 
It's disturbing that Apple doesn't have important UI issues like these completely worked out.

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
     
QSilver
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Aug 27, 2008, 10:05 AM
 
Just as another point of reference re: large contacts lists, Guy Kawasaki notes near the end of this posting that he has over 9000 contacts. Guy says "Searching for contacts while in Phone or Camera is also tolerable."
     
CheesePuff
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Aug 27, 2008, 11:05 AM
 
I only have a little over 100 contacts and when I open the Address Book app it works instantly but when I choose a person through the SMS or Phone app it takes a few seconds, odd.
     
zombie punk
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Aug 27, 2008, 11:50 AM
 
Originally Posted by Nexus5 View Post
In my company are 240.000 people. If my CEO wants to have them in his iPhone we have a problem.

nexus5.
This shouldn't be a problem - carrying the corporate contact list on your phone doesn't sound unreasonable. Apple should fix this pretty quick.
     
stevesnj
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Aug 29, 2008, 04:56 PM
 
I agree...I have 300 contacts and i have to wait 30 seconds for the contacts to load before i can even scrool...the 1st gen iPhone list was very quick...whats up with that?
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remibergman
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Aug 30, 2008, 11:03 AM
 
On my contact list on my MacBookPro, I do have 7000 contact and I hoped that the iPhone was the solution as no other cellphone can have some many contacts, but it's true, with more than hundred name in the iPhone, it's becoming a nightmare, even sending sms is slow and changing app like contact list to sms or mail takes ... nothing 6/7 seconds but it's so slow and certainly a bug somwhere that Apple needs to work on ....
Regards from Paris
     
xclusive
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Aug 30, 2008, 12:12 PM
 
same here...feel like throwing it out the window while mailing...they better fix this in the next update..
     
Timothy Maxwell
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Aug 30, 2008, 05:02 PM
 
I have about 4,400 Customers in my Iphone and a little over 2,000 businesses. I feel that my iPhone works reasonably well. If you assign each contact to a specific category, it will take less time to search for a particular client.

In fact, when I purchased the iPhone about 3 weeks ago, my entire list of over 6,000 contacts was automatically downloaded to my phone from MobileMe before I could even get home from the Apple Store. I was really impressed!!! I couldn't get that kind of performance from my Treo 700p even when attempting a hard wire sync to my Mac
Book Pro.
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taldrich
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Aug 31, 2008, 06:03 AM
 
Any CEO who thinks he needs that number of contacts is a control freak. It means he's losing the bigger picture if he routinely concentrates on such detail. I'll bet Steve Jobs has a few hundred contacts at most on his iPhone.

Which doesn't mean that the contact list issue isn't a problem, or that Steve Jobs is the arbiter of what's right or wrong in CEO-ship.

I assume the poster of this item is in IT support. Recommend not telling said CEO he is a control freak.....
"most people are fools, most authority is malignant, god does not exist and everything is wrong" - Ted Nelson
     
   
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