Unfortunately the Symbian operating system insists upon prompting you each time it encounters a contact with more than one phone number (in the case of SMS) or email address (in the case of email). This can often mean every single contact in the group, and if that group consists of many contacts the amount of work necessary to respond to each prompt can be daunting. To make matters worse it also insists upon posting individual warnings for each contact that does not contain a phone number or an email address, and so if the flurry of prompts doesn't put you off, the flurry of warning messages most certainly will.

ContactsEx takes a more pragmatic approach to this idea, which results in a virtually no hassle for the user. When sending SMS to members of a group, each contact in that group is examined to see if the default phone number has been designated as a cell phone. If it has, then that number is used. However, if it hasn't, then the rest of the numbers in the contact is searched for one that is designated as a cell phone. This search is performed in the order in which you have sorted the numbers. If no cell phone number can be found, then that contact simply doesn't receive an SMS and warning message is posted.

For email messages, the default email address for each contact in the group is used. If a particular contact doesn't have an email address, then no email is sent and no warning message is posted.

Symbian also doesn't make it easy to display only members of a specific group. ContactsEx allows you to narrow your contacts list to only those belonging to a specified group. That narrowed list then survives until the application is hidden, or until it is shutdown (depending upon how you configure the program).

Assigning contacts to groups, or removing them from groups, is also a tedious task under Symbian, and there isn't even an easy way to find out which groups a particular contact belongs to With ContactsEx the process is delightfully simple. You have two methods of assigning group associations: individually, or en mass.

When viewing a specific contact you can move to the Groups tab to quickly see which groups that contact belongs to. You can change group associations for the contact by just scrolling down to the group in question and toggling the state by pressing the SELECT button.

Conversely you can display a list of all your contacts and quickly see which ones belong to a specified group. Then, by scrolling through the list and pressing SELECT you can quickly toggle the association of each contact with the group you are viewing.