The Contacts Package in the Symbian OS is one of the most widely used – it helps users manage contacts related data. Naturally the package contains the Phonebook and Logs applications.
Phonebook is perhaps the most central and trendy application on today’s mobile phone. Just to give one example from an operator point of view: When Vodafone created the concept for their “Vodafone 360” service to integrate the web with mobile, they based the whole service on the address book. In their words: “It all revolves around the address book”. There is a lot of hype and momentum around social networks too. Everybody knows what Facebook is. Contacts in Symbian^3 and Symbian^4 is an answer to the call for more networking capability. A major part of the new features is related to “social phonebook”. Here are some highlights.
Some highlights of the latest Contact features in Symbian^3:
One example of the new social phonebook related features is MyCard view. It is a contact card dedicated to the owner of the device with a new view in phonebook to handle the device owner’s own status and other information.
It works like a personal dashboard where the user goes to set everything about himself/herself, including presence, photos, chats, email, and so forth. In addition enablers for integration of this into social network statuses have now been implemented. Nokia’s OVI Contacts service will provide the status information.
A valuable step forward in improving the usability was the major contribution from Ixonos. Ixonos implemented a single tap usage paradigm for several applications in Symbian^3, including Contacts.
Now all actions can be done with a single tap: open a contact card from the names’ list view (the main view), initiate the desired action (call, sms etc.) in the Contact card launcher view, or start the editor from the Contact card details’ view when a detail is single tapped, and so forth.
Other new features are predictive search from Phonebook, remote contact lookup, support for contacts HW key, contact image enhancements, just to name few.
Something to look forward in Symbian^4 Phonebook:
The most visible change in Symbian ^4 is the renewed and totally unified UI experience in Qt.
Much emphasis has again been put on tight integration with social networks so that a device user’s social network activities (and those of friends) are even more easily available (backend support from OVI is needed). A history view is provided, where the user can find all the communication history in one place, including SMS and phone calls in a conversational view.
What we would like to see happening in the near future and might be good opportunities for contribution:
As CalDAV support for the Organizer application has been implemented into the Symbian platform, it would be logical (and relatively easy) to add respective CardDAV support for the Contacts as well.
An exciting thing to keep an eye on is the Social Mobile Framework major contribution proposal from Sasken. This contribution could radically ease the connect ability to social networks and web services for Contacts.
Extensibility:
The Phonebook application is, and will be, well extensible. There is a good set of APIs available for 3rd party developers.
- - S^2 and S^3 already provide an impressive set of extension possibilities.
- - S^4 on its turn offers a generic, platform independent QT Mobility API.
About the author
Markku Kaurila is Contacts package owner coordinating Contacts and Logs application development in Symbian Foundation. He has been working for Nokia since 1992 and Nokia mobile phone development since 2001. He is also a part time teacher in a local college teaching C++ to international students. When he is not developing phones, he enjoys taking composing lessons and playing guitar in his band. Collecting electric guitars is a passion. In the summertime renovating a 100-year-old cottage takes the weekends.
There are two things I would to see in contacts and it would be great to know if they are on the roadmap or on the ideas site.
The first is an extension of contacts search. I’m aware that there is functionality around to search a remote database (i.e. a corporate directory) if an entered name is not known. However I would love to be able to search the contact lists on my friends phones remotely (assuming they have previously given me permission to do so) and being able to copy the contact I need to my device. Think of this as “contacts pull”.
The second is centralising my contact details on my device. Currently if I change anything in my profile I have to inform all of my friends and often forget some. With this new model they would subscribe to the contact I have for myself on my device. When that is updated it is automatically silently pushed to their devices so they always have the most up to date contact information.
Of course both of these are based around the concept of “friends” as you probably don’t want to do this with everyone on your contact list (often because their phone won’t support it) and that is a whole other issue…
The new features do sound pretty cool. Looking forward to those future Symbian^3 and ^4 phones!
I like David’s ideas too.
One thing I’d love to see in Contacts would be the various bits of information (phone numbers, postal addresses, emails etc.) to be stored as separate items. A contact card would then embed one or more of those items.
That way, if several people live at the same address (e.g. your immediate family members) the address only needs to be typed in once and is then linked to from the various people’s contact cards. Also, it would mean if the family moves you only update the postal address once and the change is immediately visible in each family member’s card.
The same principle could also be useful to an office address / website / central phone number shared with colleagues and probably many other scenarios too.
You could then also define multiple cards for yourself (and perhaps others) to be used in different scenarios. For example, when beaming a card to a business contact you probably don’t want to include your personal phone number and Facebook account. To get around it you could define a business card for yourself that only embed the business contact details. Similarly, your personal one would only include personal stuff.
When combined with David’s ideas of subscribing to remote contacts this could become really powerful:
Imagine that your employer sets up the common contact details shared by all employees (company name, website, office address etc.). Each employee could then subscribe to those details, add their own (name, position, email etc.) and use it to roll their own business card. If any of the company’s central details change all employee’s business cards on their phones automatically contain the new info.
Your address book would never go out of date again!
Behind the scenes I don’t think this stuff would be too hard. It would most likely be some, nicely decomposed relational database replacing a collection of flat cards. However the big challenge would be to hide this complexity in the UI so that these cool features are usable and appealing to non-geeks
@David: There are some ideas regarding contacts and address books on ideas.symbian.org, but yours are not yet. Why don’t you add them? You should really take the credit for them.
[...] 2010年2月10日 11:20 2010年2月9日に英語ブログに投稿された「Getting to know the packages: Contents」の抄訳版です。 [...]
The above ideas are good, but i think David’s idea if implemented would be used by a very niche group.
Most of the people and even your friends would not like their address book to be remotely accessible by anyone, no matter how close friend you are. At least i would not like that.
If you ever wanted to pull some contact info from your friend, why not just call them and ask the info. (That would faster, easier and less complicated). Reason: If you wanted a pull method, then it means that there is some background process running on your friend’s phone allowing a remote user to access your own address book. That could be a hog on your battery life and would hurt your friend more than helping you or him. (He would keep wondering, why is my battery dying when i am not doing anything and then would blame it on the manufacturer).
The above same logic applies to the push method described above. Instead if you really wanted to notify changes in your profile, then why not just sms everyone on your contacts list your
contact card, with a feature which is already built in symbian(i think) to send sms to all. Alternatively, they can add an email to all(on the contacts list) feature so you can email everyone/anyone you want the info at one click. The contact card is sent in such a format that when someone reads the email, they can just download it and the OS recognizes automatically that it is a contacts card and automatically updates the relevant info in his/her address book.
The above two scenarios will cover both situations when you have internet connection or when you do not have internet connection.
So according to me, i think push and pull method is not worth pursuing at this point, when there are many more useful things that need more attention.
@David, Hary
As Lars says, please consider adding your ideas to ideas.symbian.org where they can receive voting and discussion, and if popular we can push their implementation.
Some of the ideas that already relate to improving contacts:
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=2854
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=2786
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=2177
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=1991
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=3209
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=3410
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=2802
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=4016
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=887
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=3477
http://ideas.symbian.org/Idea/View?ideaid=4030
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