Contact management + Birthdays

The one thing that everyone worries about while switching phones, voluntarily or involuntarily, is contacts. Nobody wants to lose their phone directory that they have built up over time to go waste. How would you like if you phone book was always up-to-date with your friends' numbers, profile pics and e-mails? How would you like to have your phone book always backed up? How would you like to have all your friends' birthdays added automatically to your phone's calendar? If you would like any of that, read on.

My old phone allowed Long Names and multiple numbers for contacts, but when I tried to transfer those contacts to my sim card memory and then to my 5800, it spawned chaos.

It seems SIM cards allow only 10-12 characters in a contact's name and only one number per contact. There were a few contacts in my directory which had 3-6 numbers stored against them. When moved to SIM card, some contacts were simply appended with numbers ( like Pulkit Agr1, Pulkit Agr2) and all numbers for that contact was split between these contacts. I had no issues with that. But, for a few contacts, the numbers kind of overflowed and weird contacts with partial numbers as names and no numbers attached to them appeared in my phone book.

And this was when I discovered this app, "Mail for Exchange" and its functionality. Now I just wish I had this application earlier and switching phones wouldn't have been that tough.

I was introduced to this app by Prashant in his blog post on "Awesome birthday management". In his blog post, Prashant has explained how to have your Facebook/Orkut/etc etc contacts' birthday information synced to your Google Calendar. And then he comes to the relevant part here, Syncing your Google Calendar events to your mobile phone. Believe me, it sounds complicated, but is not that tough, and is really great thing to have. Please go through his post after you are done here to import your friends' birthday details to your phone. (I won't be reiterating the same stuff here.)

But, what I liked most about the app is that you can sync your phone book to your Gmail contacts list.

The advantages? Plenty!

• When you buy a new cell, you can have your complete phone book back within minutes/seconds.
• Your contacts will always be backed up.
• If a friend wants your contacts, you can share it very easily.
• And something I liked a lot, your contacts on your phone will have display pics same as Gmail/Gtalk. So when they call, you will not need to read a number/name to identify the caller, you probably will be looking at their face

Excited? Let's get down to doing it then!

First, you need to go to Google Sync and in "choose your phone" menu, select Nokia S60. (S60 5th edition is basically the platform on which Nokia 5800 apps work). Follow instructions on this website to install Mail for Exchange application.

Few Notes here:

• You can also install MfE from Ovi Store app (I got Ovi Store when I ran an app update on my phone)
• I used the following settings in my MfE configuration. (MfE>Options>Edit Profile)

Now, you can edit your contacts on your phone or in Gmail, they will always be synced.

Editing contacts in Gmail has lots of advantages. One, you can merge two contacts. What this means is, if you merge a phone contact with a GTalk contact, his profile pic, his e-mail id will be retained and synced to your phone. Two, if your phone contacts split like mine ( Pulkit Agr1, Pulkit Agr2), you can merge them together very easily. Three, usually people can work much faster on computers than on mobile phones, so you will have a great contact list soon.

Please note: Only the contacts in "My Contacts" group in your Gmail Contacts will be synced to your phone.

There is a disadvantage here as well. Your Gmail "My Contacts" group probably has lots of users that you don't know, but mailed to while they were CC'ed in a thread that you were part of. It takes some effort to go through your "My Contacts" group and remove those contacts that don't belong there. For a person like me who used the same Gmail account for publicity etc for college fests, this was a bigger task. But it is definitely a one time task.

Another disadvantage is that probably few of your friends don't exist in "My Contacts" group. I'll suggest, after you have synced your phone contacts with Gmail, go through your contact list and if you find any contact that has just a phone number defined, search for that contact by typing the name in search contacts box and merge these two contacts and make sure new contact is moved to "My Contacts".

Well, I think I have given a very comprehensive post here about contacts management. I'd like to end with a note of caution, please backup your contacts through Nokia PC Suite before trying this, you may actually end up losing your contacts.

Thanks for reading this post. And don't forget to post comments if you have any doubts or found it useful or discovered an issue.