(Last edited Sept 15, 2008)

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Address Book beaming

The second most important program on the Palm device is the Address Book. It’s where you keep all the important information of your friends, family, business contacts, businesses, etc.

My own personal white and yellow pages

For me, my address book is more my personal White and Yellow Pages. I keep entries of businesses, contacts that I may need to refer to, like restaurants, airlines, credit card emergency lines, tech support lines, etc. You never know where you may be and may NEED to contact someone, especially in emergency situations. Especially nowadays when it’s almost impossible to find a yellow or white page, you should have your own collection of numbers that you may need in an emergency. My friends are always asking me for numbers of places or hours of business instead of looking it up in the phone book since I’ve already got it in my Palm. It’s very handy and unlike an overexpanded, bulging address book, an additional address entry or any kind of extra data doesn’t add any physical bulk to the Palm. The Palm device has its physical size and won’t change regardless of whether you store only 10 addresses or thousands, plus ebooks, dictionaries, games, etc.

That’s the beauty of having a Palm. The Palm device can hold so much stuff in it that if you were to take your dictionary, photo album, address book, daytimer, mp3 player, video player, camera, etc that you’d have no space on your hands or pockets to hold them all. But the Palm can store all that and more.

Okay, back to discussing the default Palm Address Book application.

A simulation of adding an Address Book Entry

Alternative Flash links: Photobucket

This simulation shows how an address book entry can easily be made.

The simulation will play through to the end unless I’ve inserted a pop up note to explain specific points.

To continue playing the simulation, press the button.

To go back to a previous paused segment, click on the button.

To pause the simulation at any time, press the button. To continue after it’s paused, press the button again.
To scroll forwards or backwards in the simulation, click anywhere on the left (to go back earlier in the simulation), or right (to go forward in the simulation) on the progress bar.

Alternative Flash links: Photobucket

This simulation shows how to edit or make changes to an existing address entry and have it reflected IMMEDIATELY

Alternative Flash links: Photobucket

This is another address editing simulation involving the change of a surname and how everything is sorted to reflect the changes.

I will now spend a bit of time going through some of the address book screen and pages to provide more info on the application.

This is the Main Page of the address book program where it lists all the address entries sorted in alphabetical order. In this case, only the entries in the Business Category is shown.

Here’s a screenshot of the Address Edit screen of a particular entry, in this case, it’s for Air Canada, set in the Business category. Tapping on the down arrow in the lower right corner will take you to the next screen.

Here’s the screenshot of the remaining part of the Address Edit entry showing the fields for the address. Tap on the down arrow for the remainder of the address book entry which has the four Custom Fields or tap on the Details button.

This screenshot shows the pop up Address Entry Details window when you tap on the Details button in the Address book application. You can specify which phone number to show in the address book listing, the category the entry is listed under, and ability to enter a note for the entry.

This is the Notes screen where you can enter a note for the address or contact. It’s important to enter notes, especially if you need to do a search so that you can find specific information quickly. In this example, if you tap on the Find icon in the Graffiti area (it looks like a magnifying glass) and searched for Airline, all entries in the Palm which have the word “airline” will come up in the search. Tap the result that you wish to view and be taken directly to it.

Here’s a listing of the first Record Menu. You can Delete Address, Duplicate Address, Beam Address (via infrared port), Send Address, Attach Note, Delete Note, Select Business Card, Beam Business Card. Again, you can do the same task by doing the up stroke with corresponding letter. For example, / D will delete.

With regards to the Select Business Card, Beam Business Card, a business card is very much like the regular card version that you would normally hand out to business contacts. If you create your own address entry and selected it as your business card, you can then be able to “beam” (send the address book entry) to a business associate’s Palm and not have to waste time inputting the information.

Beaming and receiving data between two Palms via infrared signals

I’m not sure if anyone has ever seen an old Palm commercial where there was a man and a woman at a train station. They were both on different trains and yet managed to exchange phone numbers by beaming their Palm. That was yet another very effective Palm commercial that I think they should continue to keep making and showing. Palm’s marketing in the past few years has dwindled to virtually nothing, a far cry from the 90’s when it was such a hit. They were very effective, attention getters and distinctive. So well that I remember them after all these years.

Here’s a link to the Palm train commercial on YouTube. There’s lots more. Judge for yourself.

Here’s a simulation of how to “beam” something whether it be a file, program, etc from one Palm device to another via infrared. In this simulation, I have two Palms side by side, and demonstrated how I beam a file over from one to the other.

Beaming via bluetooth, I think will be similar.

Alternative Flash links: Photobucket

This screenshot is quite self explanatory. The Edit Menu allows you to edit the current entry.

This screenshot shows the Options menu where you can change the font (somewhat) and change and rename the four Customs fields located at the end of the address book.

Here’s the screenshot of the Rename Custom Fields pop up window. So, rather than leaving them as the default Custom 1, Custom 2, Custom 3, Custom 4, you can rename them to Birthday, Anniversary, Spouse, Gift suggestion or whatever else you want so that it’s more useful.

Hopefully, this post has provided a good feeling of how the Palm Address book is set up and presented and how easy it is to make changes and sort the entries according to a specific category and also how easy it can be to search for a specific contact.

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