Droid R2D2/Droid 2 contacts sorting question

[The.Dark.God]

Gonna try to keep this brief...

I own a Droid 1, and loved it. My wife won a Droid R2D2 off a Twitter contest, so I inherited it because she said it was "too nerdy" for her... not for me though haha.

Anyways, the phone is great except for one thing... the contacts list sorting/grouping features are really bad compared to the Droid 1. On my D1 I could sort by last name if I chose, and also exclude groups that I pre-defined in my Google contacts from view. I had everything organized so I would only show a couple groups (friends, family) and others didn't show up (businesses, old friends I never called, etc.)

Now on the R2D2, and on my dad's Droid 2 (and I'm told the Droid X), I see that not only am I stuck sorting by first name only, I also can't pick and choose displayed groups. I can view just "phone contacts" or something like that, but it shows all defined members of that group and ignores any Google contacts group settings. On top of that, it dumps in all my Twitter and Facebook contacts, making my contact list roughly 20 times larger than it was on my D1 and really difficult to navigate.

I want to restore as much of the D1's functionality here as possible, and I can't believe the D2 series would be lacking here so badly. I don't want to install a custom ROM since I actually like all the Star Wars touches, but I do have access to my rooted D1 and my R2D2 is also rooted. Can I somehow rip and replace the dialer or contacts apps? Or something I can configure? I think MotoBlur is the culprit, since I know stock Android 2.2 supports sorting options.

I did try a couple market apps for fixes, but since they didn't integrate with the stock launcher or contact apps, they didn't help much.

Thanks for any advice, it is much appreciated!

 

[Janey]

I would like to know how to do this too. I came from a BlackBerry and it's very difficult to find contacts the way they are sorted on my Droid 2. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

 

[johnner]

contacts sorting/hiding

Hey Dark God,

I was wondering the exact same thing. The r2d2 contacts app is pretty bad, compared to the original Droid. If I don't find another option in the next couple of days, I think I'll monkey around with replacing /system/app/Contacts* with the corresponding D1 files. Or you can do it first and let me know what happens

 

[The.Dark.God]

I extracted the Contacts, Contact Storage and Dialer apps from my old Droid 1. When I click install on the two contacts apps, it would appear that it is going to let me do so. I get the typical list of permissions the app is requesting and if I want to accept. With the Dialer app, it warns me that the system already has a Dialer installed and wants to know if I want to proceed to replace it. I canceled out of all the installs before committing further.

I'm rather hesitant to go further than this and actually attempt the install for fear of doing something nasty to my phone. I'm pretty inexperienced with what would mess up what on these, I rooted my phone and that's about all the further I've gone with this sort of experimentation. Anyone have any further advice here?

 

[The.Dark.God]

Ok, I tried installing the Contacts and Contact Provider apps from the Droid 1 and it said "<!> Application not installed." Didn't mess anything up but it didn't work either. I'm guessing this might be something on the ROM level, but I hope not.

Anyone with ROM/Root experience have advice for me? Really desperate to get my old contacts manager back... thanks.

 

[johnner]

I wonder if it's something with the filename? it seems like the D2 files were all named "blur"blahblahblah. It seems like renaming the D1 .apk files would be too simple to work, but it might be worth a shot.