Saving Information to a Contact

Creating a new contact from scratch is straight-forward enough both on the desktop and on your phone through the contacts application.  But sometimes you have information you want to store before you have the contact itself.  You may not have cut-paste access to this data or even if you did you want an easier way to get the data into a contact.

In this case you may often see a “Save” option that will allow you to do this in a stream lined way.  There are many locations providing this options but let’s take the dialer as an example.  Say you get a call from Bob Kelly, a new friend that you met recently.  When the call is over you want to save the number so you can call him again.  In the dialer you will see their number in the list and the “Save” option.

When you choose save you will see a list of all your contacts, in case this was an additional number for someone you already know, but at the top you will also see “<New Contact>”.  Since you don’t have a contact for Bob yet you select that option.

At this point you see a simple interface to get the basic information in about the contact: first name, last name, and communication type.  The phone number is already filled in for you, but you still get to specify the type of phone – mobile, work, home, etc.

When you are done entering your information you hit Save and the summary card will be brought up to display the information you just entered.  This is the same card you would see if you opened the contact from the contacts application.  If there was additional information you’d like to provide about Bob, perhaps the company he works for, you can open up the full contacts edit card by choosing “Menu->Edit”.

A recent call in the dialer is just one scenario for saving data in this way.  Others include:

• From an email – Action on the sender while viewing an email to bring up a temporary contact card that displays the user name and email address.  From here you can choose Save to get that information into a contact.
• From a text message sender – Action on the phone number when viewing a text message that has not been matched with a contact and you will get an option to create a new contact and start this process.
• From the body or subject of a text message or email – If someone sent you a text message or email with a phone number in it you can action and then choose Menu -> Save to Contacts to start this process for that number.
• From the dialer – If someone gives you their number and you type it into the dialer but don’t want to call them right then you can choose Save instead to keep the information for later.

If you’d like to learn more about your Windows Mobile phone check out The Windows Mobile Help & How-To page at https://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/en-us/help/default.mspx.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 19, 2009
  PingBack from http://blog.a-foton.ru/index.php/2009/01/20/saving-information-to-a-contact/

• Anonymous
  February 14, 2009
  I used to have a Motorola Q, but switched to a blackberry since I was disppointed overall by the performance of both the hardware and software being provided by Windows Mobile. Overall - I am very happy with the blackberry - but one feature I really miss from Windows Mobile is the ease in adding information to an existing contact. Using Windows Mobile, i could easily add an email address from an email, or a phone number from the phone dialer to an existing contact with only a few clicks - blackberry doesn't allow you to add information to existing contacts without actually retyping the information unlike WM.

• Anonymous
  February 01, 2010
  I have a Cingular 8525 Smartphone like the HTC TyTN and use with Windows Mobile 6 Professional (Portuguese) and Windows XP that are synchronized with Microsoft ActiveSync 4.5 I'm having a problem that seems simple, but do not know how to solve. When I run the first sync, I selected all the items you would like to sync (contacts, calendar, tasks, notes, etc.), but to my surprise, when I view my contacts, I could see they were gone and Smartphone therefore does not appear in Outlook 2007. Right now I'm under the impression of having lost more than 2000 contacts were in the smartphone. As I understand the contact information for Outlook 2007 that I had just installed on my computer and did not have hardly any contact, stayed on the smartphone and my schedule is currently blank. I could also see that the default setting in active sync was marked: "In case of conflict" (replace the item on my device). The problem is I need to retrieve the contacts (about 2000) that were in Smarthphone before synchronization and have now been erased. How do I make a system restore on your smartphone to the day preceding the syncronização for example, because I believe that this way I can retrieve my calendar. Is there any way I can retrieve my old contacts? How do I solve this problem? Thank you.