How to only sync contacts in certain groups

[dbronstein]

I had an orginal Droid, and there was a setting that allowed you to only sync google contacts in specified groups. I recently moved to a Samsung Stratosphere (android 2.3.5) and there does not appear to be any way to do this. You can only sync all the google contacts or none. You can select groups to hide on the phone, but that only hides them from the contacts list. They still come up in auto fills when you type names into texts and emails. I use google contacts to store all my contacts, but there are a lot of them that I don't want on my phone. Does anybody know if there is a way to get back to the previous functionality? It drives me nuts when they remove useful features for no reason.