Treo Essentials

Most information stored on your Treo device is stored as a record, which is a discrete chunk of data that represents one logical piece of information. The Contacts application stores each individual contact on your device as a record. In this way, you can think of the Contacts application as a simple database. Because your Treo device is a mobile communicator, which implies communication with other people, contact records in many ways represent some of the most important information on your device. Therefore, understanding how to manage and manipulate them efficiently is important.

To launch the Contacts application, tap its icon on the main application screen or press the Option button followed by the Calendar button, assuming you haven't changed the default application button settings. The main screen in the Contacts application consists of a master list of all contacts stored on your device. Later in this chapter in "Categorize, Filter, and Sort the Contact List," you find out how to filter and sort this list to help make it easier to access certain contacts. For now, it's important to just get comfortable moving around within the list by using the Up and Down buttons on the five-way navigator.

Scrolling through the contacts with the Up and Down buttons moves you through the contacts a line at a time. To move through the list a page at a time, hold down the Option key while pressing the Up and Down buttons. The phone numbers for each contact are listed immediately below the contact, which helps you quickly access and dial a contact without having to open the entire contact. You can also select the contact itself instead of its number, which opens the contactjust press the Center button on the five-way navigator or tap the contact name. After a contact is open, you can view all its details, such as snail and email addresses, a photo of the person, his or her birthday, and so forth.

TIP

To quickly place a call to a contact from the Contacts application, just scroll to select the contact's phone number in the contact list, and then press the Center button on the five-way navigator. If you press the Center button with the contact name selected, the contact is opened instead of dialed.

While viewing a contact, you can still use the Up and Down buttons to step through the contacts one at a time. In other words, if you're viewing a contact and you press the Down button until you reach the bottom of the contact, pressing Down again opens the next contact in the list. This method is a great way to step through a list of contacts to find a piece of detailed information, such as an email address or a ZIP code. When used with filtering, this technique gives you the ability to step through a related series of contacts. You can also use the Up button in a similar fashion to scroll to the top of a contact and then on to the previous contact in the list.

Similar to most other data on your Treo, contacts can be categorized to help keep them organized. You can even create your own categories to logically divide contacts. For example, I have several different categories of business contacts along with categories for family and friends. This helps me quickly access a certain group of contacts rather than sift through the entire contact list.

The remainder of this chapter focuses on managing and organizing contacts and generally squeezing the most functionality out of the Contacts application as possible.