Palm Pre Basics - #7 - Synergy in the Palm Pre Contact and Address Book

Butterscotch Tutorial Special Palm Pre Basics Part seven of twelve: Synergy in the address book Jay Goldman: Hi I'm Jay Goldman the host of Mr. Mobile. Today we're going to take a look at the contact address book on the Palm Pre. Address book uses something that Palm calls Synergy, which puts the web in webOS. Synergy allows you to configure multiple accounts that you'd like to have the address book synchronize with and they can be on a bunch of services. You'll note here that I have my Palm profile setup, which you setup when you setup the Pre the first time, a Facebook, a number of Google accounts. These will synchronize automatically over the air so I don't need to plug anything in. I can manually synch them at them at time by tapping on the sync now button. I can also add another account and I have the choice here of Google, Facebook or Microsoft Exchange. I'm not running any exchange account, but adding that option will allow us to keep the Pre completely in sync with your contacts in your exchange server. The beauty of this approach is that the Pre actually finds matches between those different accounts and combines them together into one person. So you'll notice that some of these have multiple cards stacked up behind them, indicating that I know that person through different channels. I can search at any time by just starting to type from the main screen here. So we look for my friend Joe Smith and in Joe's contact record I have a number of different ways to contact him; a mobile phone number and I can SMS by just tapping on the SMS bubble, a home email address, a Google Talk account and a work address. The Pre is letting me know that I know Joe through two different means and by tapping on his name at the top here I can see what those are and I can choose to link more profiles, which allows me to go into my address book and find something that the Pre may not have found on its own and link those two contacts together. I can assign a photo to Joe. So in this case I have already assigned him the bubble image that comes with the Pre. By going out into the photos application, choosing either a photo that I've shot on the Pre's camera in the photo role or one of the wallpapers that comes with the Pre. Type on the action button, assign to contact, search for your contact, use multi-touch to scale and move the image around. Tap when you're happy and Joe will now have an updated image. Editing a contact is very simple. Go to the contact screen inside of the address book, tap on the edit button that appears and you can now change the entries that are here or add new ones. If I want to delete a phone number for example, I swipe the phone number out, tap on the delete button, I can add a new phone number by tapping on new phone number and just typing it directly into this field. And since I'm in a phone number field already, the Palm understands that I'm typing numbers and I don't have to hold down the alt modifier key. All of the different field are available here and I can edit any of them by tapping on the new button or by striking them out if I want to remove them. Stay tuned to the rest of our series for more information about the Palm Pre. Thanks for watching. Butterscotch - Tasty Tech; Delicious Downloads. Butterscotch.com, a division of Tucows Corp. Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/