Insight 6From UIQ 3 to S60: Part 4
I meet with a group of people for dinner and bible study every week, and sms/email comes in handy when I need to communicate with all or part of the group during the week. Often it’s a case of confirming attendance so we know how much food to prepare. On the E71, it’s quite easy to search and select a group of people to message or email. And if you have people in groups like I do, it saves you searching the whole contact list.
The problem I found however is that once you’ve selected someone, whether one or many, in a group, you are unable to see any contact details unless you unmark them all or go back to the contact list. I also discovered that this behaviour extends to the general contact list. Basically, once you select a contact, it assumes that you no longer need to look at the contact details. In reality, there are occasions during my contact selection process that I want to check details of a certain contact to decide whether they should be included. So, this feels very strange to me as I expect to be able to view the details of a contact whether they are marked or not like in the standard UIQ contacts.
 E71 Contacts |
 UIQ 3 Contacts |
What’s more? UIQ standard contacts is designed in such a way that I can see all the major contact details such as phone numbers and email addresses of a contact on the list view. This is particularly useful when I need to quickly check on phone numbers without needing to waste time going into a contact’s detail and scroll through to the information I need like in the E71 standard contacts.
 E71 Contacts |
 UIQ 3 Contacts |
The E71 is clever enough to let me specify which number or email address of each contact that I want to send the message to, as people often have multiple phone numbers and email addresses. The E71 also tells me how many of the people don’t have valid details to send the message to and only includes those that can be sent in the message, but it stops short of telling me who those people actually are. Sending to a group of more than a few people, that means I have to go through each of the selected contacts since I don’t remember which one has missing details or which ones are not included in the send list. UIQ in comparison is more user friendly since it not only tells me how many don’t have valid email address or number, but actually show me a list of those people.
 E71 Contacts |
 UIQ 3 Contacts |
Another thing that I have mixed feelings about is the way group messaging works using the group feature on the E71. It’s easy enough to message multiple people, ie. if you always message or email everyone in a group at one time, all your contacts have relevant and valid details and you don’t repeatedly message the same group of people. Well, I failed in all these accounts. As mentioned before, I have a group of people that I message to all the time and although group members are unlikely to change from week to week, specific circumstances call for messages to be sent to some and not all members of the group at times.
A major problem for me lies in the fact that all the time and effort that I put into selecting the preferred number or email address for each contact becomes a repeated task every time I send a message to the same group. In this case, I found DreamLife Contacts dynamic group messaging more complete and flexible, combining the best of both UIQ and S60. It shows most used contact details on the list view like UIQ contacts, providing a group messaging facility that displays send to details of all selected contacts including those with missing details, displays all relevant details for each contact and allows me to choose the preferred number and address for each, and the best part is being able to save these preferences within the group for future use. So next time I want to send a message to this group, I simply check that all send preferences are correct, select another detail if not and deselect the contacts that I want leave out in the group message. This is a lot easier and saves me time from all that extra key pressing in order to get the same thing done.
 E71 Contacts |
 UIQ 3 Contacts |
 DreamLife |
Posted February 27, 2009