my iPhone contacts list is too long

[yesthattom]

The mac can sync your entire address book to your iPhone. The problem is that most of my entries don’t include phone numbers thus I find myself scrolling endlessly through tons of names that I can not call.

I created a “smart group” that is “entries where phone is set” but it turns out that you can’t sync smart lists to the iPhone. You also can’t sync “subscribed” calendars to your iPhone. You can sync smart lists of music to your iPhone, I guess because music is more important than getting things done in the hippy dippy Apple world.

Pissed. Me. Off.

So, does anyone have a suggestion of how to deal with a 987-entry contacts list that only has 408 entries with phone numbers?

Comments

[etler.livejournal.com]

I don't know about the contacts, but I subscribe to my girlfriend's google calendar and it shows up on my iPhone just fine. Don't know what I did, it always worked.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

iSync doesn't do them. I assumed iTunes wouldn't either but don't have any "subscribed" calendars now. I guess they fixed that bug.

[la-directora.livejournal.com]

I was just looking at the contacts when I answered you before. I've got a subscribed calendar, and iTunes handles it just fine.

If you are syncing through iSync instead of iTunes, that might explain some of your problems. The iPhone is designed to sync most seamlessly through iTunes. I'd try switching to that and see if it solves some of your problems.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I am using iTunes. The iSync reference was from my Palm days.

[la-directora.livejournal.com]

Ah, now I understand. :)

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

I had a variant of this sync problem with iTunes and an iPod the first time I played with syncing "smart" playlists: I defined a smart playlist in terms of another playlist, and attempted to sync the ipod with the smart (subset) of the other. It failed. My guess is that smart playlists are always recalculated on each device (i.e. they sync the rules for the playlist, not the results), and if the underlying referents aren't being synced along with, you lose.

So, the suggestion to make a "dumb" list of contacts from a "smart" one, and then sync that, makes most sense as a work-around (sync the results, not the rule(s)).