How To Effectively Use Contact Groups In S60
So, you’ve got this massive list of contacts in your S60-powered smartphone. Fantastic! But do you have them organized? One of the most often overlooked features of S60 is the ability to create Contact Groups. You can manage this on the phone, but you can also now use the Nokia Communication Center on your Windows-powered computer to manage these groups from your computer with ease. So, how do these Contact Groups help you manage your time better? I’m glad you asked.
Let’s begin with creating a few Contact Groups. Open your Contacts application, and then press the right d-pad to tab over to your Groups screen. Odds are, you don’t have any in here. To create your first group, simply press Options, and Create New Group. You can give the group a name, and then save. You can now click on the group to add people from your existing contacts list. Very easy. Alternatively, you can use the new Nokia Communication Center to create groups, and then sync those over to your phone. Unfortunately, there is no way, currently, to sync Contact categories from Outlook to your phone, so you’re stuck with either creating your Contact Groups on your phone, or with the Nokia Communication Center.
Now that’s done, let’s explore a few ways in which you can use Contact Groups to better manage your contacts, as well as notifications of incoming phone calls.
First, you can assign a specific ringtone to each caller group easily. This way, you can always have a better idea of who’s calling. For instance, my groups are ‘Bros’, ‘Chicks’, ‘Family’, and ‘Internet People’. My goal is to have every single contact fit into at least one group. This way, I can set each group to have its own ringtone, and then assign a different ringtone for anyone who’s not in my contacts list. By setting it up this way, I can easily determine who is calling based on the ringtone, without even looking at my phone, which is brilliant.
The second great way to really get some utility out of the Contact Groups on your S60-powered smartphone is within the Profiles on your phone. You may have noticed, but if you go into Profiles, and choose to Customize one, you’ll see towards the bottom of the settings that you can select which Contact Groups get through. This is brilliant if you have a ‘Work’ group, as you can create a special profile which, when active, silences the ringer for anyone whose number is listed in that group. For example, let’s say you leave work at 5p, every day. If you’ve set your boss as a contact, and put him in a ‘Work’ Contact Group, you could simply change your profile at 5p so that if he calls after you’ve left work, the call will not ring, and will eventually dump him into voicemail.
Another brilliant way to use Contact Groups is for mass messaging. Note that a single contact might be included in more than one Contact Group. This is useful if you have a group of people that you normally SMS, such as a group of friends that you hang out with, a group of classmates that you work with, or your coworkers, if you often use SMS to keep in touch. Once you’ve set them as a Contact Group, you can easily create a message that sends itself to everyone in the group, without having to manually choose each person each time you need to send a message. This is an extremely handy tool for coordinating plans for a night on the town, or any other instance in which you may need to broadcast a message to a set group of people.
To send a message to a group, you can either simply create the message, and then click in the ‘To’ field to add a contact. When your contacts list opens, tab over to the right to get to your Contact Groups, and select the group you wish to message. You can also open the Contacts app, tab over to your list of groups, and use the options menu to create a message. Either way, this is an extremely helpful tool to organize groups of people.
How do you setup your Contact Groups? Are you using this feature to its fullest? Do you have any other tips that can help you really manage your contacts effectively?
I have a program called “Group Creator” for automatic group creation.
Right on the money Pablo. And i’ve already reviewed Group Creator here on Symbian-Guru ( http://www.symbian-guru.com/welcome/2007/12/group-creator-f.html and http://www.symbian-guru.com/welcome/2008/01/group-creator-g.html).
The first article also mentions a way to easily get contact groups back after a format or factory restore or firmware update. Helpful tip IMO :D
Now tell me how to sync contact groups with the groups in the mac address book….
chicks!!!
Ovi Sync too offers kinda similar option like the communication center with the Synchronized contacts,they can be grouped according to you will from anywhere and then sync back to you device.Isn,t it?
Great features, now how about just one unified PC solution. PC Suite, N series Pc Suite, E series Pc Suite, Ovi…. please stop with it now. Unify them all.
oh btw that was for Nokia! :)
nokia has gone mad with apps
My contacts are synced with Outlook on my PC and within Outlook I have groups (categories) defined. I would like to use Groups on my N95 and understand that Outlook Groups will not sync.
I’d be happy to set up groups just for use on the phone but am afraid I may be introducing a bugger-up factor for when I sync back to Outlook, what do you think ?
Brilliant. So they have Groups that don’t talk to the Categories on my Outlook. Just brilliant.
[...] Ricky talks readers through the process of setting up Contact Groups, which he says there is a high chance of not being set up yet. The simple instructions allow [...]
[...] done to Ricky Cadden for putting together a nice little ‘how to’ on using Contact groups over at Symbian Guru, including practical examples of why they’re [...]
What everyone said about synch failures. Which is weak, as there are groups with much the same value on the desktop.
I also gave up on them when I couldn’t figure out a way to use groups as I do on the desktop, as a filter when searching. I go ahead and have my whole contact list on the phone, as I might get a call from any of hundreds of clients. But sifting through that whole list to find a friend or relative not hotkeyed is harrowing. Clicking on the group name just tries to message to them all. Is there any way to filter and just see the people in “chicks” group, say, from the example above.
Groups with a single person are useful for people I regularly send messages to. Instead of sifting through contacts each time I send a message, I just scroll through my much shorter list of groups for the recipient.
Groups are useful by themselves, but the biggest problem is that they are usually not synchronized …