The next stop in the OS 4.5 review is the address book and calendar improvements. Nothing drastic here but the options and look of the applications has changed quite alot. Once of the changes has actually been for the worse. Read on to see…

As I mentioned the address book now has a new look. Unlike the previous address book you can only see about 5 entries per screen since RIM has added another line to show the company name/notes after each entry. This one is a judgment call if you like it or not. Personally I wish there was a way to revert to the old view.

There seem to be two new options in the menu. One to map on Google maps and one to see the activity log. I don’t remember seeing those before but they may have been there.

The options are not that impressive. You can see the higher level ones below. Notice also the listing of the address books you currently have sync-ed.

The views break down into two options. Sorting and separators.

There are a few new options on the contact pages and the look has been changed to look like the new email templates.

Notice the inclusion of birthday and anniversary mappings

You can see the birthday and anniversary options below. The only setting is by date. These then get added to the calendar. Pretty nifty!

Now on to the calendar. The calendar now has bolder lines as you can see below. No new menu options have really showed up except the one mentioned after this set.

You now have the vague option to select a different calendar. I guess you can have multiple calendars in exchange to sync with your Berry. You can also see the new “month” view below. For some reason you can show your BIS calendars as a different calendar. Maybe BIS 2.5 will allow for calendar sync?

The options also allow you to change the color of each of your calendars. This way they show up in the week and day views with different highlights. When you click on each calendar you get the menu as shown below to the right.

If you click on general options you get this menu. Nothing really changed over there but it was worth looking.

You then can see what it is like when you create a new appointment. It will now ask you which service you want to send the invite through. You can choose from your BES or BIS accounts. Sadly they have still limited the reminder to 1 week and it is not an editable field. I really miss the ability to set 2 week reminders like you can in Outlook.

Thats it for now. Expect more to come…

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 and is filed under News.

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