I have the Blackberry 7103, but will be getting an 8703e tomorrow morning. I had the same problem, but mine was A-K. I went through my address book on my PC and cleaned it up. Some ,-) characters caused it to stop reading the list. As soon as I limited the list to just characters and numbers, it read the whole thing in.

The owner of my dealership has an 8703 and he says he has almost a thousand names in.

Also I don't find it takes long to sync each time I get into the car.