Tips and Tricks

Disappearing contacts

Some Pocket PC users have reported their contacts mysteriously disappearing—they look for contact information on someone they know is listed in Contacts, but the individual is no longer there. There are a couple of possible reasons for why this happens:

You can accidentally delete a contact without knowing it. I did this once. I was in a hurry and not paying close attention to what I was doing. Here's what happened:

1. I tapped on an item in the Contacts list to see the full entry, but I held down too long and the Edit screen popped up.
2. I tapped on another part of the screen to make the Edit menu disappear, but I tapped too close to the menu and accidentally hit the Delete option.
3. When the "Are you sure you want to delete this..." message popped up, I attempted to tap on "No" but wasn't careful and hit "Yes."

Tip: The greater the time pressure, the more you have to focus on what you're doing—and slow down a little.

In another situation, the contact might seem to disappear but can actually still be there. The Contacts application has a filtering feature that lets you display only those items in a certain category.

On pre-Windows Mobile 5.0 devices, open Contacts and you'll see a small down-arrow in the upper left corner of the display, below the word "Contacts." Tap on the down arrow and a list of the available filtering categories will be displayed (Fig. 1). If you have the "All Contacts" option checked, all of your contacts should be displayed. If you have anything else checked, then any contact that does not have that category assigned to it will not be displayed in your Contacts list view. It will still be there, but you just won't see it.

Fig. 1: On pre-Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PCs, the Contacts filter is accessed by tapping on the small down-arrow in the upper left corner of the screen.

On Windows Mobile 5.0 devices, the Contacts filter is accessed from the Menu option in the tool bar at the bottom of the screen. Open Contacts, tap on Menu (lower right), select Filter from the pop-up menu, and tap on the category of contacts you want displayed. Tip: Leave "All Contacts" selected unless you are trying to narrow the list down to a specific group of contacts. When you are finished contacting individuals in that narrowed group, immediately re-select the "All Contacts" option.

Fig. 2: On Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PCs, the Contacts filter is accessed from the Menu option in the tool bar at the bottom of the screen.