I’ve been using Gmail for years and foresee using it for years to come. I’ve just recently become obsessed with getting my Gmail contacts up to date with correct email addresses, phone numbers and addresses. I know people still use actual address books, but they’re bulky, usually left at home, and harder to update. Plus, for those of us with smartphones, Google Sync handles the task of getting your Gmail contacts into your smartphone and syncing them back and forth when changes are made. Google Contacts is now even its own stand-alone page instead of having to be accessed through Gmail.
There are a few things however that Google seems to be missing the boat on when it comes to their contacts, and judging from their competitions address books, they are glaring omissions. You can add your own custom fields for the options below, however custom fields do not sync to your mobile device.
- Birthdays and Anniversaries – Google Contacts does not have a native field for these important dates. This would be especially handy if it created its own “Birthdays & Anniversaries” calendar in Google Calendar.
- Websites – The masters of the internet omitted a section for personal and/or work website. Considering this is an option in basically every smartphone’s address book, it seems only logical to have a native field for this.
- Photo – The option to add a photo to each contact (or grab the photo a person has already added themselves if they’re using Gmail) is great but it is not exported nor synced to your smartphone. This would be especially handy on an iPhone or Blackberry as the photo is displayed to identify a caller.
I found another blog post by Joseph Scott here that brings up similar points. Let’s hope Google hears our cries and gets these features under development. I hope one day Google releases an Outlook type application with Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, and Gmail Tasks integrated. That would be heavenly because as great as it is to create Application shortcuts for each using Google Chrome, it would still be nice to keep them all in one desktop app.
As a side note, I attempted using Outlook’s “Home Page” feature to make Outlook open the Google applications instead of the built-in ones, but it just wasn’t the same.
Hey, what’s up? My name’s Brendan Berg and hopefully you find something on this site worth your while. I’m an engineer and so-called gamer from Edmonton, Alberta.