[iDriveX]

Hey All, Looking to purchase a P800 / P900 Sony Ericsson phone and have a quick question about contacts and how the phone manages them.

First off, I'm under the impression, from reading some reviews that the P800 / P900 can have contacts grouped into Folders. In Apple's Address Book, you can create groups as well. Do the groups in Address Book transfer to the Px00 when you run an iSync?

If No, can you put the contacts into groups afterwards on the phone?

If you do put contacts into groups or folders on the phone, how does that work when you go to sync in iSync. Does the Address Book application in OS X recognize the groups?

I would really love a phone that I could create a group called "Work" and a group called "Personal" and keep my friends and work contacts separate. Will this phone work well for this?

[Fillman]

I run a P800 and sync with my PB12" using dot mac and iSync. On the PB I maintain my address book in several work related groups and a couple of personal groups.

On the P800, I don't bother with grouping and all the contacts are in one giant list. Even with over 900 contacts I don't find this any problem to locate a person to call since looking up in the address book on the P800 is done via surname anyway. Incoming calls automatically identify the contact and flag their picture whenever there's one present.

Bottom line is that groups on the phone really aren't needed. The P800 would allow you to manually allocate them into groups but that's a lot of extra effort.

If you want a phone that is a complete PDA organiser with some neat programming capability (and a camera) then the P800 or P900 phone is the way to go.

[MickS]

I use categories to manage contacts on my P800, I find it easier to manage them that way. That these are not shared with the Address Book is a pain but not a surprise. The groups, note not categories, in the Address Book are a different beast to the on phone/PDA categories. A contact can be in one, and only one, phone/PDA category. That same contact can be in many Address Book groups.

More annoying is that I can't map date related categories to iCal calendars. There is a one to one mapping here that Apple could provide an interface to.

[goose]

Originally posted by MickS:
[.....]

A contact can be in one, and only one, phone/PDA category. That same contact can be in many Address Book groups.

[.....]

That's kinda how it's done with MS Outlook and PocketPC......I think. Well, at least in Outlook for sure.