Contacts Out of Control: Ways to Finally Organize Your Smartphone Address Book

We’ll just come right out and ask you. Is your smartphone address book out of control? Have your numbers become such a chaotic jumble of new and old info, you can hardly find the number you need when you need it? Don’t worry. It happens to the best of us. This doesn’t mean that you have to live with an out-of-control contacts management system. Here are a few remarkably easy ways to finally organise your smartphone address book.

Be a bit less social

Does your phone alert you to every random Facebook friend’s birthday? Clean ‘em out of your iPhone in a hurry by readjusting your smartphone settings. To prevent Facebook from sending you alerts about anything, find the Calendar tab and slide it to the Off position. On an Android device, go into Account Sync and uncheck the contacts option.

When you set up a Facebook or other social media account, be sure to adjust your settings right away. This way, you’ll prevent your phone from being jammed to the gills with useless and irrelevant notifications. You can then fine-tune your privacy options to allow notifications from Close Friends, Family Members or another exclusive group.

Consolidate contacts lists and address books

First, decide which e-mail service works best for you. This is the destination to which you’ll want to save your consolidated address book. Export contact info from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, iCloud, Outlook and other e-mail servers into a single address book. If your contact numbers are saved only to your phone and not a computer, you can use your contacts app to import to your Android device. Saving specific calls to your phone is best accomplished by way of an app such as Automatic Call Recorder for Me. This sleek call recorder app for Android allows you to retrieve whole conversations, providing one or more parties to the call know that it’s being recorded.

Apple smartphone users will want to download and install an app such as My Contacts Backup for iPhone, recommends Techlicious magazine. On your Windows phone, you can view and edit your address book at the WindowsPhone website.

Duplicate contacts?

If your phone is full of duplicate contacts, you’re wasting a tonne of valuable space. You could do this one by one, but chances are, if you’ve got one duplicate, you’ve got dozens.  Use an app to kill duplicates while merging clones. Not only will your smartphone be simpler to use, you’ll have a lot more space in which to save the sort of stuff that really matters to you.

The xDialer for Android is a user-friendly contacts manager that makes it quick and easy to dial frequently used or favourite telephone numbers. Available at Google Play, this handy app is free to use for one week. If you find it useful, you will be invited to make an in-app purchase, say Wondershare reviews.

Invest a bit of time in cleaning and arranging your phone files now, and you can save valuable time in the future.