How can I display phone contacts as a compact list?

[AC Question]

It makes no sense to me to have so much real estate devoted to each contact when there's so little on the screen. Any way I can show it as a list, one line per contact, as iPhones do?

 

[Crashdamage]

You didn't say what your phone is, but in vanilla Android after opening the Contacts app just tap on 'All contacts' toward the upper right and it gives a list view.

Android since v1.0. Linux since 2001