Cell Phone Address Book

With the growing no. of contacts, the cell phone address book is also growing.
How many of you still maintain the traditional phone book diary. While we still have the traditional diary, I don’t remember updating it for the last few years. Newer contacts keep getting added to the cell phone address book. And with the same first names, I have been finding it challenging to manage the address book :).
I started with adding last names for the common first names. But at times this was becoming longer to search. So the newer contacts in my cell phone address book are now getting a prefix i.e KV-*, Jash-*, Tlab-*, In-* (India) etc.
So what is your strategy to manage your cell phone address book ? Do you only add the nos of folks with whom you talk often and others are maintained in an e-database that you can access? With the smart phones I am guessing this may not be a problem, but still …..

3 Comments:

  1. I maintain my address book in Yahoo! address book. It contains phones, addresses and birthdays as well. You can assign folks to a category. So all my India contacts are in category “India”.

    I sync my Yahoo address book with my cell phone. The sync is 2 way. So any change in cell phone contacts gets reflected in Yahoo address book too.

    Occasionally I export my Yahoo! address book in outlook format and then via a custom perl script i prepare my own paper phone diary.

    Whenever someone sends out an address update or phone update I update my Yahoo address book first. Even If I lose my phone I can easily recreate my entire contact list.

  2. I follow almost same as above but instead of two way sync I keep cell with short version of contact list then Y! address book. We merge his & her’s Y! address book using above mentioned custom script and print common paper phone list every 6 months which goes on our fridge & wallets. We excludes some category from printed list to keep it short. Those nice to have contacts stay online only. 🙂

  3. My cell phone is my reference for phone numbers and is the first to get updated. Usually add some info in the contact name itself e.g. Speedy Oil Changer will be stored as Auto Speedy Oil Changer. When I need to search them, usualy enter generic term e.g. auto. In other cases, will add hints in address line. I do use prefix for some like LP for LocalPhone numbers. Ocassionally sync with Outlook for backup purpose. Use yahoo for email addresses.

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