From UIQ 3 to S60: Part 2

Organising Activities

Over the holidays, I had to keep track of a few family and kids activities as well as my own. I like to keep everything in one place, so activities of all my family members are on my phone’s calendar. Now that I’m back at work, my work activities will go on there as well.

On my computer’s calendar, I can separate activities in categories using colours to differentiate the various areas of activities and people. For example, green for work, red for church and pink for my daughter’s activities etc.

My calendar tends to get filled fairly easily and when it does, especially with activities from multiple areas and people in my life, being able to categorise and identify them at a glance in a busy week is really helpful. I find separating them by colour works best for me. I was able to do this on the UIQ standard Calendar, though without colours. Unfortunately, my new E71 doesn’t have any visual way of categorisation as such. Categorising contacts is supported on the E71, but it doesn't appear to support calendar groups. I'm used to organising activities by activity area and people, and not being able to do so on the E71 is a limitation.

Organising Contacts

I’ve got quite a lot of contacts. I have my personal and work contacts, then contacts of my daughter’s friends, and all the other contacts information including service providers, schools, shops, doctors, banks, restaurants, clubs etc. Most of these I don’t access regularly, so I tend to forget their names after a while. As my contacts accumulate, I find categorising my contacts based on how they relate or fit into the different areas of my life is a great way to manage and locate contacts. Thankfully, the E71 has groups, and the categories that I created previously on my G700 were transferred across.

Groups on the E71 are mixed in with contacts, so they appear as an item/name on the contact list, differentiated by an icon on the side. This is fine if I have a particular group in mind and can easily search for it. But there are times I don’t remember how I labelled a particular group or I'm not sure whether a group already exists. The natural thing to do is to look for a list of all the groups. To my surprise, there’s no group view on the E71 and the only way to see all the groups is to try adding to a group from a selected contact. It’s also strange that there is no group information available in a contact’s details. Group details can only be edited separately from the contact. It feels as if the group feature is an after thought and has not been integrated into the Contacts module properly.

In contrast, UIQ’s standard Contacts makes more sense in this area. It has a folder view allowing you to see all your categories at one glance. It shows which folder/category a contact belongs to amongst its other details. It allows you to edit folder details within the contact edit view.

Posted January 21, 2009 - Updated February 3, 2009