Issues in the contact book

Technical Support
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Hello everyone,

I noticed there are a few issues when scrolling through the contacts on the Mudita Pure. I can’t consistently replicate the problem, but you can sometimes observe contacts missing from the contacts list entirely when scrolling through it.

I hope everyone understands what I mean, because writing the issue out in detail is a bit hard :smiley:

When you are in the contacts app, and you scroll from the top position to the bottom position, then you may normally see every contact that you ever added without any issue.
But if you are currently selecting the very first contact/position in the entire list and then press the up-key once (so that you end up directly moving to the last page in the contacts book and are selecting the very last contact/position in the list), and then scroll through the entire list in reverse from bottom to top, then it is possible for entire contacts to be skipped and not be displayed at all.

Scrolling from bottom to top changes the usual fixed position of your contacts because going from page 1 directly to the last page makes the last page “full” with contacts, without the last page having any empty rows. If the last page usually had empty rows when you were scrolling from top to bottom, then those empty rows will be filled in, which results in completely shifted positions of the contacts. The contacts on this phone are displayed in multiple pages and not in one dynamic list after all.

This issue of missing contacts may somehow happen when a contact is in a position, where it would be between two pages or so. This issue may also somehow be related to the alphabet letters using up one row of space, too.
A result of this “contact shift” is also, that some contacts will be displayed a second time on page 1 again, after scrolling past those same contacts on page 2 already.

Can the team look at this and fix the issues in a future update?

I would also be happy about the option to entirely disable the alphabet letters in the contact list, or have them disabled by default. If needed, you can see which letter you are currently at, by just looking at the names. It just doesn’t look right when there is one row with a letter, then after that you have only one contact, then comes another letter, then another single contact, then another letter, then another individual contact etc.
Another thing about those alphabet letters/sorting letters: Sometimes you have a letter on the bottom of a page, without any contact under it, because there is not enough space on the page to display the contact that would come next. But going to the next page displays the same alphabet letter a second time, which looks weird to me.

I think it would be more minimal and more aesthetic if the letters would be gone entirely. And maybe the phone book would look better organized when the last name would be positioned before the first name?

Thanks everyone. Maybe it would have been possible to write this out in fewer lines, but I guess my head doesn’t work right now :smiley:

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@anon16803201 Thank you for reaching out. Would you mind sending your Mudita Pure logs to Mudita via Mudita Center?
This way, our team can see if they can replicate the issues.
Here are the instructions:

Also, can you DM me your phone serial number?
Thank you.

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My SIM card’s contact list was poorly compiled on an old Nokia phone. Importing them resulted in first names often being last names and vice versa, and also not very consistent, as sometimes the last name suffix would turn out to become the first name. In addition some names are capitalized and some aren’t. This results in a listing like this:

  • D
    John Doe
  • d
    Jane doe
  • D
    Richard Doe
  • d
    Jr. doe John
    …

This capitalization problem, in combination with pagination, makes the list unpleasant to browse through in my opinion.

So yes I agree.

In addition, searching should be made easier. If I remember correctly, my old Nokia had fuzzy search for finding contacts. In my opinion, the user should also be able to type a string, rather than a single letter, to filter for matching contacts.

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It would be cool if the contacts-app got some kind of soft revision to make it more standardised. There are various instances where the organization/tidiness in the app gets interrupted by a bug, although you could argue, that the contacts app should be more orderly than all the other apps :smiley:

Something fascinating that I heard about is the japanese philosophy around business cards (Meishi). Maybe the team is interested to have a look at that business card culture, where the cards are seen as an extension of a persons identity. In my opinion it goes hand in hand with the philosophy and design of the Mudita products, especially the Mudita Pure.

This Meishi-culture is also originally why I got this phone!
I wanted a phone that follows the concept of having very few features, but that still allows to save contacts. When I found this phone, and found out that it also uses an ePaper-screen, I fell in love.

Looking at that “paper”-screen while having one of your contacts selected, feels exactly like holding a business card in your hands.

In theory this device could work as a big motivator for networking and connecting with more and more people over time. That means, in contrast to the average smartphone, where you waste away your time in solitude in front of a screen, the Mudita Pure scores with its unique implementation of a contacts-app, which in turn makes you socialize more.
But not being able to do this consistently kinda breaks the experience :frowning:

Also one more thing that could be an argument for a light contact-app redesign:
If you have many contacts with the same last name (when you save all your family members for example), they are of course listed right behind each other. But within this list, they aren’t sorted by first name, although “first name” should be the next logical sorting factor after “last name”. Four of my family members first names go in that order: G, I, E, D. But it should be D, E, G, I .
I am not sure what the next factor for sorting is, because for those four contacts I have only written down a phone number and nothing more. And even if you go by those phone numbers, the contacts aren’t sorted by size or sequence of digits in those phone numbers.
Contacts seem to be sorted randomly, when they have the same last name.

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It may take some effort, but I think browsing through the changes in the relevant files may help to describe your issue.

Could you perhaps take a picture to show the issue and edit it to redact away personal information?

There may be multiple different issues at play here. FYI I think this commit is relevant to the listing issue I described above

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I prefer not to take pictures of the phone, but I already sent logs, so I think that should work.

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If you update to the new version, it seems to be running a bit smoother.

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@anon16803201 Have you updated to the new OS? What’s your experience with the contact list after upgrade?

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Oops, sorry everyone.
I updated to 1.6.0 and it seems, the initial problem with the missing/skipped contact is fixed, thanks everyone :partying_face: Maybe it is just because my contact book looks a little bit different from back when I observed the problem, but when trying to recreate the problem, it wasn’t possible to recreate :smiley:
I imagine the other issues get fixed in a future update because they were addressed right before the recent update (the random sorting of contacts with same last name, options for disabling the heading letters (A-Z) in the contact book, option for switching to last names being shown before the first names/to the left of first names, that one compiling problem one of the users had with his SIM card, reworked searching feature), if at least the team has the time and resources for this, because I imagine you have many other tasks to do :exploding_head:
In addition to that, it seems that scrolling through the contact list from bottom to top, can result in the same contact(s) being displayed in page 2, and then again in page 1 (so you pass by the same contact(s) two times). Maybe it is possible to rework the contact book in a way, that you don’t go from top to bottom/bottom to top for multiple pages in your contact book, but rather you scroll through one big dynamic list, that doesn’t “turn pages”, but just keeps going to the bottom, until you end at the last contact entry. This could prevent this kind of problem completely.
Other than that, yes, the device (and the contact book) seem to be running much faster and smoother, that’s so cool :slight_smile:

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@anon16803201 AWESOME! Thanks for sharing your feedback! I will pass this on to the team.

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Hello again to everyone,

I wanted to bump a topic again, which is important to me and a few other people in the community. We all perceive the Mudita Pure project as one that follows minimalism, among other things. It is made to minimize the contact with toxic effects caused by the internet and entertainment media as much as possible. But also the design is minimal, which is a very positive feature of the product.

Nevertheless, the Mudita Pure cell phone wants to motivate its users to use its own special features. The meditation timer is there for good reasons, and the minimal features the phone has (playing music, writing contacts, clock features, etc.) invite to use it enthusiastically. Each of the features convinces me to this day that it was the right decision to get the phone.

However, there is one single drawback in an application in the phone that often takes away my motivation to deal with the phone properly, and this application is the most important one for me personally. I wish so much that it was possible to sort by last name in the contact app, and that there were no sorting single letters as headings, because they break the flow when scrolling through. It would be a dream scenario for me if I could look in my contact book, and from top to bottom just scroll through my entire circle of contacts, if my family members’ contacts were all in the same location because of the same last name, and so on… . Either way, it’s also unusual that it’s sorted by first name at all… I seem to remember that in my previous phones it was set the other way around by default (but you could always change it to the other sort order). This would motivate me even more to network in real life, because I only keep all my contact options in this phone. I always have the first name, last name and phone number of someone saved, nothing more.

This would make the phone perfect in my eyes. Then it will be well rounded in all aspects… is it possible to do this little redesign? Remove the letters and make sorting by last name possible?

Thanks to everyone!

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Thank you so much for your feedback! I have shared your insight with the Development Team and they will take a look at this. However, I must mention that I can’t guarantee the implementation of this particular feature.

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