Tommi over at S60.com brought up an interesting topic - How Would You Revamp The Phonebook… Or Would You?
My answer is yes, without any doubt.
As much as I like the Nokia's Eseries devices, and I really do, there are changes I would like to see in future products. Per Tommi's post, let's focus on the phonebook and hope he can bring our suggestions to the right people within S60.
The main issue I have with the phonebook application on the Eseries devices is that it feels rather weak as the phone book of an Enterprise device.
As an Eseries user I expect the phonebook to be able to handle hundreds and even thousands of address entries.
It should also be able to display these entries and let me interact with the information in the address book in a really intuitive and simply brilliant way.
Here are a few changes I would like to see on the phonebook application of the Eseries.
1. Make better use of the screen real estate
The screen of the Nokia E61/E62/E61i have so much space. More space than is currently taken advantage of even without making the screen appeared cluttered. You could easily fit in more information, either text based or icons representing mobile phone and desk phone numbers.
2. Include phone numbers on the top level phone book view
Palm is legendary for always, always trying to reduce the number of clicks/steps to reach information. Include one or possible all telephone numbers of a contact in the top level view of the phonebook.
Compare with the layout of the Treo 700W below left and the Treo 650 below right.
Of course, on the Nokia Eseries you press the green call key to bring up a complete list of phone numbers. However, I would prefer to see the phone numbers listed clearly visible under each address book entry.
3. Prioritize the information displayed
I would love to have been a fly on the wall when the layout of individual phone book entries was discussed and decided. How interesting it would have been to listen in on the logic which lead to the below layout.
Personally, I don't understand why it was decided to include information fields such as "First name", "Last name" "Company" and so on. Considering that this information devours precious space I think it is a waste of pixels. I'm sure most of us already know what the first and last name of our contacts are. As long as I can control the order of which first and last name is displayed I can figure it out 
and don't need the application to point it out for me.
The same goes with "Company", "Job Title" etc. Because of this layout each screen only display three pieces of information - complete name, company and job title.
Compare with the amount of information displayed below.
4. Make it *easy* and *intuitive* to access killer features of the smartphone
A QWERTY smartphone is all about communication. The three killer apps/features are in my opinion voice, corporate email and SMS (to some extent IM). Make it easy, really easy and *intuitive* to access these features from the phone book.
Let's take sms as an example and look at how many initiate an SMS from the phone book. It is not the easiest and quickest way but I am pretty sure many, many use this way.
Select the contact, scroll down to mobile,
Press "Options", scroll down to "Create message" and select "Text message". Phew! That's quite a lot of steps.
However, there is another way, easier, but not as intuitive as to create an SMS from the mobile phone number field.
The easier way is to select the contact and then directly press "Options" and select "Text message".
It's fast but not very intuitive. Now let's take a look at other platforms. On the Treo 700W send text message is a separate field in the individual address book entry. On the Treo 650 you select the mobile phone number on the top level address book and you can initiate a text message by selecting "Message" from the bottom of the screen.
5. Easy to search, easy to find
Many of my friends who use smartphones, whether it may be BlackBerries, Treos or Nokia Eseries have thousands of contacts in their address book application.
If you have that many contacts it is crucial that there are several ways to search for a contact. The next generation of the phone book for Eseries should include an option to search for contacts based on any field of information - name, company, title, email etc.
On Windows Mobile it is possible to enter part of a phone number to search for a contact. The numbers entered are used to eliminate contacts.
If you know that a contact has a certain area code but you forgot the name you can just enter the number. Entering 85 brings up the contact just as entering "ab" does.
7. Innovate, innovate and innovate.
Be bold! think outside the box, conduct copious amounts of market studies and benchmark against state of the art devices and platforms.
I'm not sure if this is exclusive to Treo 700W or if this is standard on all Windows Mobile devices but it is rather nifty. As you quickly scroll down through the hundreds or thousands of your contacts in the phone book on the Treo 700W it is very hard to read the contacts flying by to see where you are. To solve this problem a letter automatically appears on the screen showing where in the address book you are currently scrolling.
Very smart and very useful!
These are just a few of my suggestions of improvements of the phone book application - what are yours?
Interesting & thanks for sharing your thoughts. I would like to see the layout of the contacts change to put more on the screen (like the Treo) as well, and provide context sensitive options for the selected / highlighted number or address. This would make the phone book far faster and easier to use.
To be very honest, and I’m not sure why people are treating this issue with kid gloves, Nokia’s address book sucks. Perhaps you won’t share the sentiment if that’s all you’ve used, but ask anyone who’s switched from a Palm to an S60 phone. Every time I see a comparison like this one between applications on the Palm and the S60 3rd editon, I look longingly at the Treo I put aside to get an E61. Right now, the only reason I’m sticking with the E61 is the fantastic hardware and great RF.
Oh, I forgot to say thanks for a great post all the same. At least if the people at Nokia (like Tommi) are willing to listen and act on feedback from the community, posts such as these are valuable.
I absolutely agree with two things:
1. Real estate. When you scroll in the phone book and highlight the name it is impossible to select the number if you have saved multiples under, for example, “telephone (home)” and “telephone (business)”. Neither (home) or (business) are showing.
2. Getting read of special characters in the phone number like dots, brackets, dashes (simple text parsing). When I am copying an entry from my corporate phone book to my local telephone contacts (Blackberry client) I can not dial it if it has dots (555.555-5555). I have to edit it. Really annoying.
Well said, Ed. To follow up on your statement
“…I’m not sure if this is exclusive to Treo 700W or if this is standard on all Windows Mobile devices but it is rather nifty…”
That feature is a Windows Mobile 5 feature found on all pocket PCs. I switched from a WM5 XV6700 to an E62, and your article hits the nail on the head where this phone book is concerned. I will never miss the stability issues inherent to Windows Mobile but to able to sync categories for Email, Contacts, Tasks & Notes via OTA Exchange Server to the WM phone was wonderful and I’d like to see Nokia address this for the benefit (non-Intellisync) users.
I would really like to be able to put spaces between numbers in the phone book and be able to save contacts by first name, last name or company name, any of those 3. Also make the phone book FASTER, with over 700 contacts in there it doesn’t run all that fast.
I posted an answer to this in another blog and mentioned in that one that I would like to be able to catagorize my phonebook and have multiple phone books that would sync with different programs. One phonebook with Outlook another with ACT!, and so on.
1. Get some sensible format for display. Have you seen how addresses are displayed? “Street: “, “City: ” etc.
2. To-do items need their full “notes” field to be displayed. How worthless would only the subject of an email be?
3. Folders for contacts. Would be nice to synch the company directory and my personal contact folder from outlook.
4. Being able to go through contacts by company.
5. The phonebook isn’t a lone application. Don’t treat it as one. It interfaces with the calendar, etc.
6. Skin it. Why not allow people to make “themes” for display of contacts, etc? You won’t make the ultimate interface to suit everyone. Admit it, move past it, allow them to extend it.
That’s all I got for now.
I found myself nodding and agreeing to pretty much everything in the article and the posted comments… Some I especially agree with are:
- speed of the overall app in general… it’s very slow.
- Use of screen space and better options
- the ability to have multiple contacts databases to keep my corporate directory/crm directory and other contacts separate (especially since MfE doesn’t allow look-up of corporate contacts)
- being able to dial my numbers with a (0) in them which I use when dialling from outlook (stored as per MS technet article)
finally, not completely related, but getting tasks to synch properly ota too would be great… I have no way to consistently store my tasks between devices etc…
Thanks for your feedback Ed and others!
I just forwarded the link to this entry to the main man behind the future development of our S60 phonebook, and asked him to check this out.
As for the SMS Thingie: I always have the “New SMS” Button on the Standby Screen. From there I put the initials like “C B” into the recipient field, type my message and press the green key. Search the desired number and youre done. I think thats more the more intuitive way. You want to write a message not surf the phone book and then decide to write a message. Its the same you do with email. Finding the correct address/number is the job of the messaging application
As others already said, I find this comparison full of good points. One thing that I could add is that it gets even worse with thousands of contacts (try beginning a 500 and then at 1000). The phone gets slow to actually recognize a phone number (either you calling or receiving a call) eventually leading to you missing the call because the interface is frozen.
Hope this will get improved as this is the major gripe the users have with the six E61 we bought at work (they where previously using palm (being understood that those couldn’t pass a call)).
For me, the real killer feature of the e-series is sip, yet it takes 5 or 6 clicks to make a sip-call if you haven’t defaulted to sip. Very strange. It’d be nice if something like shift + green would make a sip-call, or something…
(Also mathcing everything before @ against the phonebook on incoming calls would be nice, so that one doesn’t have to have all numbers doubled to get cid with names…)
As someone coming from a Treo 650 (and many others!) to an E61, the phonebook feels unfinished.
I love the fact that If I wanted to call “Joe Bloggs”, I could type JB on the Treo. 2 key presses and it accurately gives me a match. On the E61, I could type “Joe”, which would give me all the Joes, or “Blo” which would narrow it down to Joe, his brother and his sister. Its twice as much effort.
Another excellent option on the Treo was the option to have keypresses search for a contact from the Home Screen. 99% of the time, I call someone from the address book in the phone. On the Treo, you could take the phone out of your pocket, unlock the keypad, type someones initials and press green. 3 seconds, tops. The Nokia has an annoying interim step of loading up the address book program from the menu in Active Standby or a Softkey. It feels like a waste of a programmable softkey to me. Its also a waste to dial a number from the Home Screen (when was the last time you ever called someone like that?!) when you can dial a contact.
You can set the phonebook for the E61 to show First Name, Last Name which is nice. But then this is not followed through in the messaging applications, home screen or anywhere else in the phone. “Joe Bloggs” in my address book turns into “Bloggs, Joe” when they send me a message. Its a lack of attention to detail.
If any Nokia developer is interested in my feedback I would love to hear from them.
I have been using E-70 since last about 8-9 Months.
The Most annoying feature of this phone (May be other E series too), is that if you receive a call which is stored in your Phone by the Tel number only say (City Code) 33- (Tel No) 12345678 But the receiving time it is received as +91 33 12345678 (With country code) then it may not identify the stored name in phone. It will just show as number then you have to think whose number it is.
Also searching by Tel number is not possbile, this is main disadvantage, because some one calling you may be stored in your phone book, but due to above mentioned reason his number may not appear as name but just as number and you need to identify whose number it was then its not possbile to search by numbers.
Can Nokia understand this problem and solve it ?
Hussein Jodiyawalla said it best..I also had to leave the Nokia system due to limitations on my 6820 (flip w full qwerty) I went Treo-tic and I really really loved that phone…the 650 to be exact. Can’t drop them too many times however and they like to freeze up daily. So after returning as I eagerly awaited the Rise of the E Series (I’m obviously using the new E 70) I was am still very much disgusted with the flow of the phone book function. I would like for an option to be created that allows you to type the first letters of who you want and hit the send button. It’s the most convenient function I’ve ever experienced. I also agree with Dev’s post about how you don’t know who is calling. If someone’s phone by default or not, puts a +1 infront of their number..My phone won’t recognize them if I saved the number with out a +1 in front of it. ANNOYING to say the least. And that’s my two cents.
Its a shame that the contacts list is so poorly used, we’ve got such a nice high resolution wide screen and most of the screen isn’t used and the fonts are huge!
Nokia phones used to be known as having the very best in UI’s, but the symbian phones, despite having the far more flexible OS to develop in, just haven’t carried on that tradition.
I’m now on my 2nd Sony Ericsson personal phone (the E61 is my company phone). when I first moved to the SE phones I really didn’t like the UI, but I found that it grew on me.
Things like the alarm clock stand out. On the K750i you could have two alarms, a one off alarm and a repeating alarm. But the repeating alarm could be enabled for set days of the week. Perfect for a weekday alarm clock! On the W880i there are now 8 repeatable alarms. (Ok the alarm thing was the single reason why I went for another SE phone).
[...] Note.2) simply allow users to change the defaults and views - “skin-it”read more | digg story [...]
Not being able to search via company name in the address book is a killer… Having come from non S60 Nokia phones to the first S60 phones and then to a Blackberry before moving to an E61 I can tell you that the Blackberry folks just plain thought it out and did what was needed by a corporate (or an end user) with alot of contacts.
Also for those of us on E61’s with Blackberry SW - the integration of the BB company directory lookup into the menus is horrendous.
Why the phone book didn’t get an adjustable font size AND the ability to add columns (e.g. right next to the smaller font names I would like - I would want COMPANY!
Peter says: “Its a shame that the contacts list is so poorly used, we’ve got such a nice high resolution wide screen and most of the screen isn’t used and the fonts are huge!”
Sure, the font in the contacts list is largeish, but its not terrible. You can see 6 contacts at the same time, and its very readable from any sane distance.
My gripe is that when you access the contacts details to get their names/numbers/addresses the fonts are so small! The “information priority” is wrong here, the words “First Name” are a sensible size, but the actual (more important) name of the contact is tiny. I have a fairly high contrast theme and with my good eyesight I can manage. But my dad for example has to strain a lot - he never has had a problem with any other phone.
It has been said many times that half of the screen is wasted by putting details under the headings instead of beside them, causing unnecessary scrolling. I just wanted to mention it again because it is so obviously silly. I respect that changing this for the E61 would require a rewrite of bits of the address book specifically for this phone, but hey, it would be worth it. This form factor has a future, and I’m sure it would be handy on the E90 Communicator, Flip-Over E70 and more.
Forgive me for hogging the comments here for a minute but usability is something that I do feel strongly about.
I’ve mentioned too many times that I’ve owned a PalmOS Treo, but for me the best phone in terms of usability I’ve ever had was the Nokia 6310i. Its sad how things have gone downhill for Nokia (imho) since then in terms of ease of use, but a quick look back at what made this phone truly great would really help.
(1) It was fast - to open the address book with hundreds of contacts took a blink of an eye. The fact that a device is a smartphone is *not* an excuse for waiting for key applications to load.
(2) It was powerful - I could set a reminder in my calendar to call a friend after work from the the address book. When the alarm goes off, I just have to press green to dial. I miss these neat little touches.
(3) It was terse. There were not too many options, it did not give me too many choices. With todays PTT, VoIP calling and media messaging we can probably not get back to the terse menus of the 6310i. Maybe they should be optional? My operator does not offer PTT and a minority of users take advantage of the SIP client. A setting to turn off all these options and menu items that will not be used would be a good idea.
Even with all these criticisms, the address book gets a ‘B’. There are plenty worse phones out there, but to be taken seriously as a business device it really has to be an A+.
I’m not even going to get started on the calendar application - that thing is so important but to give it a ‘C-’ would be generous.
I have downloaded the new nokia search feature http://mobilesearch.nokia.com and I like the ability I have to search within my contacts for things like company name or title and return results. I would like to see the abillity to search for company name within the address book. Perhaps a menu option could be to search by company, dispaying the name and title of the person. This may be a bit excessive on a small screen but I think it would be very helpful.
Lets say I need to talk to the product manager at comany X, but i don’t remember the name. I could easily find the person this way and click the call button to dial. I could think of pleanty of reason to use this feature. It could be done very easily and add an enhancement to the standard address book search.
Oh, I forgot to suggest that a thread get started on suggested improvements of the calender application, supposedly only worth a ‘C-’. Perhaps some of us have ideas to make it even better than the Treo.
Regarding point 2: “Include phone numbers on the top level phone book view” and the observation regarding the list ofnumbers that appears on pressing the call button on a contact - there is a slight workaround.
If you create a default number (Options>Defaults>) then the default number gets dialled the number on pressing the call key. Of course, this might just be based on my style of using the phone, but I find it handy. Also, this might not be quite practical for people having 700 contacts.
Another practice that I follow is storing a person’s complete name in the space for ‘First Name’ and put the person’s company in the ‘Last Name’. Of course, I’d like the company to be searchable, but I guess one can’t have everything.
Wasn’t there an application that made contacts more useable? I think the company features were included in Alon Contact Guide (I could be wrong). An application called MumSMS for S60v2 made the phone list searchable by number. These things should be made available for S60v3 too.
And finally (though unrelated):
Ed: Please introduce the world to the magic of Fring (http://www.fring.com). Skype and Google Talk calling through WiFi. No routing calls. All your readers need to know about it. You could write a review.
I have a hack of time with Synchronize. Aside from having to pick sub-folders in my Outlook Contact, I have to every time to reset the Settings so Outlook have control and over ride Phone. Otherwise I will end up with a lot duplicates in the Outlook.
The bigger issue is that 50% of the records are missing either First or Last names, second (home) address, and most of the time second e-mail address.
Does anyone know how to configure the mapping between Outlook Contact records to the E61?
Regards, Yan
i think all that tommi brought here is pointed to nokia E90.
it has all the fetures.
as you know that all symbian phone ver 9 features is converted and transfered from S90 [7700, 7710], so that all s60 devices has the all s90 useful features.
The display of phone book should look like a business card (since e61 have the perfect screen, business card format screen). If the information is not sufficient for 1 page, the application should make secondary one for one person (1st page for business contacts, pictures, office phone number, etc; the 2nd page for personal contact such as home addr, birthday,notes).
I tried nearly all the avaiable smartphones, from Nokia upto Palm and I prefere the last one!
I have more that 500 contacts and palm can only handle it as quick as I required, so Nokia has to focus a little bit on this.
Somebody mentioned the skinable contact detaqils, which is ok, and it would be nice, but if we go a little bit further, the best would be to have the option to personalise the hole addressbook! What I mean?
Most of the users, who has a smartphone from any brand use minimum 2-3 category! Family, Business-Collegues, Friends. My idea is, that before the first syncronisation, you could define a layout (if this is the right term) for your groups. You never add the company name for your mom, but you have to add the birthday or any other occasion, but for your business partners you might need the postal address!
With a couple of easy step you could create this formats, and your phone apply this for all your contact in the group!
Can nokia make the contact sync work with as many Outlook contact folders as the user has already created. Hopefully these outlook folders could automatically create a group on the phone. I had a piece of software from Chapura called pocket mirror that allowed me to do this with my palm treo. http://www.chapura.com/pm_professional.php I think it would be a great enhancement if a similar software worked with my nokia E62.
I would love to see the message details of an SMS tacked on after the message. At the moment you have to go Options>Message Details to see them, but with the size of the screen the ~150 characters of an SMS fit in about half-two thirds of the screen.
My other dream is that one day a digital clock will be in the top bar (probably on the right next to the battery level) at all times, or at least with an option to turn on/off. Some titles may be quite long and be cut off by the clock, but if it could be turned off I can’t see a problem with it. I would seriously pay USD$30 for this.
It would be so cute to have 2 or more different phone books (address books) you can choose between. One for private data, one for company data. I’m looking for a software, but couldn’t find it, yet.
Hi Stefan,
That software exists and I wrote about a while back. Check out this blog post:
http://www.e-series.org/archives/367
Cheers
Ed