One of the first things you’ll want to do after powering up your Windows Phone 7 phone for the first time is to get all of your numbers and contacts on there. After setting up your phone, head over to the ‘People’ stream, located in the top right of the main homescreen menu. This is your address book where all of your contacts will be stored.
This quick guide takes you through the basics of adding and syncing contacts to your Windows Phone 7 device.
Importing and adding contacts
If you’ve any existing contacts on your SIM card you can add them straight to your phone simply by selecting the ‘import SIM contacts’ option, found under the People menu.
Adding new contacts is a simple cast of tapping on the plus symbol on this page. You’ll be taken to a page where you can manually enter names, numbers, email addresses and the like for new contacts. You can also personalise your address book by adding photos and assigning specific ringtones.
Adding email accounts and syncing contacts
If you want to add contacts from email accounts or Facebook, it’s a good idea to connect to the net on your Windows Phone 7 phone over Wi-Fi. If you’ve got a lot of contacts, doing this will avoid eating into the monthly data plan of your contract.
To connect to Wi-Fi head to Settings > Wi-Fi and input the password of the router or Wi-Fi hotspot you’re connecting to. When you’re all connected up, head back the People menu to start syncing contacts.
From here you’ll be asked to add email accounts. You enter your email address and password in the same was as you’d normally log in to your Google Account, Hotmail, or Outlook etc. Contact information will then be pulled from these accounts and saved on your Windows Phone 7 phone.
If you’ve owned an Android phone before then definitely add your Google account. All of your phone numbers that you stored on your Android phone will be copied across to your Windows Phone 7 phone. Unless you back up all of your contacts to your old SIM card this will save you from manually entering any old contacts you might have.
Once you’ve added one or more accounts, Windows Phone 7 will start pulling contact information from the web. Your contacts list will slowly be populated with all of your friends and contacts.
Depending on how many contacts and accounts you have this can take a few minutes. If certain friends and phone numbers don’t display straight away, it’s probably still gathering info from your account.
Syncing Facebook information
You can also add friends from Facebook to your Windows Phone 7 contacts library in the same way. The benefits of adding Facebook information to your contacts is that your friends’ profile pictures will be automatically assigned to their numbers in your phone.
The news feed of your Facebook profile will also be displayed in a second column next to your contacts list. From here you can add comments and likes to people’s statuses as well as post your own.
You can’t access photo albums or check notifications from here – you’ll need the full Facebook app for that – but it instead gives you an at-a-glance look at your Facebook news feed
from your address book.
Linking profiles and adding info
People’s phone numbers, email addresses and Facebook profiles and numbers won’t always automatically sync up – this may be because their Facebook name is different from their real name, or you’ve previously saved their number under a nickname on your SIM.
To link contact information together under one profile manually, tap on a contact and use the link icon (the chain) to connect two profiles together. Alternatively you can add missing contact information manually by selecting the pen icon on the right.
Adding contacts to the home screen (speed dialling)
Lastly, you can add favourite contacts directly to your Windows Phone 7’s homescreen by tapping the drawing pin icon on the left. This allows you to quickly call, message or write on people’s Facebook walls without having to scroll up and down through the contacts list.
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