Favorites limit

What if you have new contact, or your entering many
new contacts during meetings. After a few days you
need to find that person and you can't remember from
the 40 or so people that you met with during the last
few days. You may remember the company name or city,
perhaps state. But the iPhone is so crippled with no
search, what do you do?

i agree, a search feature and/or voice dial would be nice. for the time being, one thing you can do is create a smart folder in your computer's address book. i set one up for all addresses added within the last week (or day or month,etc) - then i have separate group folders that automatically sync on the phone. new addresses added to the phone are automatically imported into address book and then filtered into the smart folder. then, once a week or so, i sort through them and put them into the groups i want them in. not perfect, but it helps.
hopefully a search feature will be forthcoming.

I just press one of the little letters down the side and that narrows it down to last names for that letter. Makes it easier.

I only added 5-8 to my favorites as who whats to many then your having to wade through that too.

Wow, I don't think I'd ever even consider entering 40 new contacts into a phone while at a meeting.

Here's something you can do, though. Create a new group in iCal called something like meetings, or the company name, or the matter on which you're going to meet, or just iphone-added. Then when you go to enter new contacts into the iphone, just make sure you tap new when you're in that iphone-added group.

The first benefit is that all your 40 contacts will be grouped in that group, so it'll be easy to find them.

The second is that when you get back to your computer you can drag them into your regular groups where you'd like them to be, and also keep them in the iphone-added group, or maybe make a new group named for the matter and move them there and delete them from the iphone-added group, so they'll still be grouped together in the new group, but will also appear in All Contacts and any other group you've put them in.

Since I have a lot of contacts, I've made extensive use of groups to keep them organized, and I've found that really paid off for the iphone.

Smart groups won't sync, so I've also used smart groups to find, say, all contacts from a particular company or set of companies, and once the group is populated, I can then make a real group named for that company and copy them all in from the smart group into the newly named group. Then delete the smart group.

While it is indeed a pain, it bears repeating that the iPhone is designed as a consumer cellphone, not a business cellphone. As such, it is indeed missing a lot of the features that you find on a Blackberry or a Smartphone. But it wasn't designed for that market.

I have about 400 contacts on my phone -- the exact same 400 contacts that have been on every phone I have owned for the last 6 years, give or take 10 or them. Its not a business phone by any means.

So what's the limit?

Apple really needs to add Voice Dial!!

Thanks, Scott K.

Hey, even us longtime Mac addicts don't take everything Jobs says at face value all the time -- he's a businessman.