Phone contacts with non English characters
 

I've had a long time problem with contacts used on cell phones. I used the same set of contacts I created with early Nokia feature phones, adding contacts over the years and then importing them to smartphones. There is one problem that still bugs me today, it is the use of Chinese characters.

For example, I add Chinese names on the contacts to make them display the correct way such as Tom Lee, [Chinese], to make this happen I put Tom as first name, Lee as last name, and then Chinese character as suffix. I did that for convenience. Asian and Chinese used to have the first and last name in reverse order unlike the westerner, where the last name is our family name, so that Tom Lee is actually Lee Tom we will use normally, but most Asian and Chinese have an English name as "call name" too an alias, not necessarily a legal name and may not on the ID/passport, this arrangement helps in search, we simply search the English names and scroll down the list to get the correct contacts easy and fast.

I arrange the names on the contacts as mentioned, but that does not always work depends on OS version and phone model, the contacts looked fine on HTC will not be right on Samsung for example, that wasn't the arrangement of names used but an known flaw on the contacts/Android. I got over 100 contacts arranged the above way, but there are few that do not display right and becomes like Tom [Chinese] Lee for example. I thought the contacts were messed up after many times of import and export, and I did see there additional details from previous phone contact not displayed on new phone when I view as text, so that I delete and recreate those contacts with display error, but that did not fix the problem. Interestingly on the CAT phone, I simply remove one letter on the contact and put back, then I see the display changed instantly into the correct arrangement, but that may not happen on Google Web Contacts, Samsung and Nokia completely confusing gave me lot of headache, but as soon as I remove the Chinese names the display returns to correct order. The easy way to fix this is to put whatever I want to display all in one line on the first name field, but that's not the preferred way to do, any comment ?

Why not use Pinyin?

It's not the input method to use but the way Chinese name display on contact, I already have the Chinese character by handwriting or voice typing to use for contacts, you may try to copy any chinese text input to contact see how it works.

Surely there's an App?