Problems with Contacts.. Syncing lots of people who are not contacts.

Question

I just picked up my white 16gb iPhone and am generally impressed, but I'm having tons of issues with the Exchange contacts sync.
First, it synced a huge number of contacts to my phone, not people that I've added to my local contact list. It appears to be the full set of everyone who's ever sent me e-mail on my exchange server. I work for a very very large company. As a result, any time I do anything on the phone that involves contacts, it screeches to a total halt and becomes unresponsive for a little while. It's painfully slow, on the groups screen, the time between pressing on one of my groups and having the phone actually do something is in the range of 10-15 seconds.
I can't figure out how to delete all these extra contacts off my phone.
Does anyone have any suggestions? As much as I like my iPhone, this is a showstopper for me and I'm debating returning it.

Answer 1

I went to the iPhone genius bar today with the "large number of contacts crash my Contact, Phone, & Email apps" and they pretty much told me that the iPhone isn't ready for enterprise users with a large number of contacts (in the thousands). He offered to switch out the phone, but conceded that it wasn't the phone, but the way the iPhone works with Exchange -- namely that the Contacts database isn't stored remotely. It appears (to me, anyway) that you have partial data (names) on the device and then when you need to pull actual email, phone numbers, etc. it has to reach out over the network and get that info.
While the app is waiting to pull down x-thousand names to populate the Contacts app, the app (and any application depending on the Contacts app,like phone and email) times-out and quits. Maybe they will move towards the blackberry architecture where contact databases and email are stored on the device, which would greatly speed up response time, and maybe even make a Search command available.
For now, I have a device that is great at telling me about the weather, the stock market and watching YouTube, but can't quite be used to make phone calls, send emails, or look up contacts. Drats!
To their credit, Apple has sent me back to AT&T to seek out another solution. I am sure it'll be solved someday, but not yet. Looking forward to that day...