Why does my iPhone display no contacts, but display the correct name when I dial a number? I recently updated to iOS 5 (I know it took me forever), and after I did, all my contacts disappeared. However, when I would dial a number, it recognized it and would show the person's name. It stayed like that for a few hours, and then miraculously my contacts reappeared after I turned the phone off and on a few times. How did that happen?
I had the same problem. Contacts were showing up, for example, if someone called me or sent me a text and were therefore in my 'Recents', but did not show up in my contacts list either through the contacts app or through the phone contacts list itself (probably the same thing anyway!).

The solution that worked for me was to go into iCloud on my iPhone and set Contacts to 'off'.  This gave me the option to 'Keep on my iPhone' or 'Delete from My iPhone'. I chose to delete them. Once this had happened, I re-enabled Contacts and my contacts list was all synchronised back from iCloud correctly within a couple of minutes.