Smartdial: Combining Calls and Contacts

ChaniJ — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 11:15:00 GMT

In a recent post I talked about the introduction of Smartdial to WM Professional and described a bit of what it does. In a nutshell, it provides you with a filterable list of calls and contacts.

But I thought I should say a little bit more about the “calls and contacts” part of that description. Smartdial aggregates your contact list, your SIM contacts, your call history items, and your speed dial entries into a single searchable list. Needless to say this could be a pretty large list. I don’t consider myself much of a talker, but even my call history list gets pretty long so when you add contacts to the list you might worry that it could get unmanageable.

To try to prevent that from happening we did a couple things in WM6 to make the list more people centric and manageable.

First, we collapse all the call history entries from a particular contact or phone number. So if you have called your friend Bob three times and he has called you twice you’ll still only see a single entry for him in the list. The icon will indicate the direction of the last call (incoming, outgoing, or missed) and the communication method will be set to the last used (work, mobile, etc.) so that you can easily call back at the same number.

This doesn’t just apply to people in your contact list – if a phone number is not recognized as being associated with a particular contact then all of the calls to or from that phone number are collapsed as if it were an unnamed contact. And of course in either case you can easily get to the full list of calls to the person through the summary card and the Call History Per Contact feature that I described in another post.

Then, because this is a dialer after all, we order the list by time of last call. So the first entry in Smartdial will always be the contact or phone number that you most recently communicated with. Because we collapsed all the call history entries for a given person they will be ordered based on the time of the most recent call you had with them. So of course you can always press talk-talk to call back the last person you talked to, and it is easy to find people you contact often at the top of the list.

Of course, with the list ordered by call history it becomes even nicer to be able to use filtering to find people you haven’t spoken to as recently who are further down in the list. So it all ties back in to that original post about filtering in Smartdial – how convenient J

Outlook Mobile Team Blog : Tasks

Smartdial: Combining Calls and Contacts