Replace the People app with the stock Android Contacts app?

dgs2000

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May 16, 2010
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Hi all,

I'm thinking of getting a Dinc but after playing with someone else's I found myself really disliking the Sense People app compared to the Contacts app I have seen on a Nexus One. It just seems unintuitive (why are there "Phone" and "google" contact groups?!?) And syncing changes from the phone to Gmail contacts doesn't seem to work.

Has anyone come up with a way to use the standard Android Contacts app without rooting?

Thanks,
DGS
 

mclarryjr

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Nov 2, 2009
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I'm assuming there would be any problems getting that stock people app to work on the DInc because we currently are using the stock gallery. But I'm just guessing and could be wrong.
 

Revolutionary

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May 12, 2010
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It may seem unintuitive when you dig into the settings abstractly, but once you link entries for those "phone" and "google" (and "facebook") groups, it is actually quite intuitive. You just stroll through People on some rainy afternoon, go into an entry, and click the button to "link." It then gives you suggests from all of your data sources (I have google, phone, facebook, and exchange contacts). So for each "person" you end up with one meta-contact that pulls data from all of those sources and keeps it synced. For instance, suppose your friend changes their phone number, but only updates it on Facebook and doesn't tell you. Well, you no longer have to go directly to the Facebook "contact" -- the new number just appears for that Person. Very handy.

For the most part the suggestions are good and automatically pull in the right person. To the extent that it doesn't, you just have to cruise your People list and look for duplicates to link up. Took me about an hour to do all 185 of my contacts.

Couple this with the widget, and its a good way to manage your contacts. Send SMS, email, or Facebook messages directly from the People app, rather than navigating to one of the other apps, selecting compose, and then finding the contact.
 

eyecon82

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May 26, 2010
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I find the people app to be way too cluttered....it has all of your google contacts only when I want certain ones synced
 

dgs2000

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Thanks everyone. Can you confirm if the Dinc can sync contacts with Gmail both ways? We could not get this to work on my friend's Dinc. Changes made on Gmail synced to the one, but not the other way around. We even cleared the phone's contacts to get rid of the dreaded "Phone" contacts, but still updates adds or deletes on contants did not sync back to gmail.

To me this is the dealbreaker and why I'd have to either find a way to get this working with the People app, or get the stock Android app on here before I got the Dinc
 

Qazme

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May 1, 2010
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ALL Android phones sync contacts both ways. You just need to save it to your google accout which it asks you when you save a contact. Then as posted above "link" any dual addresses. Pretty simple, not cluttered once you figure out how to use it. I like it a lot actually.
 

brain228

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Don't know of a replacement app for the people app. I didn't like the favorite people widget cause it took up too much space. I browsed through the market and came across "contact widget". It does the same thing but you can set up individual contacts instead of a group. I like it better and you can set it up to view profile, call or sms that particular contact.
 

brain228

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Don't know of a replacement app for the people app. I didn't like the favorite people widget cause it took up too much space. I browsed through the market and came across "contact widget". It does the same thing but you can set up individual contacts instead of a group. I like it better and you can set it up to view profile, call or sms that particular contact.
 

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