To their credit, Symbian does provide a search program that can search through most of the data on your phone, including contacts, but it does not provide deep searches that look at the various fields within a contact.

For users of numeric-only phones (those without a QWERTY keypad) ContactsEx provides an extremely intuitive approach to finding names. It is based on the concept of predictive text entry, which often goes by the trade name of T9. Rather than pressing a numeric key multiple times to select the specific letter you want, you simply spell out the word using one-key-per-letter and the predictive text engine finds a word in the dictionary that matches the keystrokes used.

ContactsEx doesn't use anything quite so sophisticated, but it isn't really necessary. While there are hundreds of thousands of words in the English dictionary, there are only a few hundred (or at most a few thousand) names in a typical phonebook. So, an intelligent lookup isn't necessary to take advantage of the concept.

Say for example we needed to search for the name Sylvia Smith. Let us also presume that we'd decided to sort our contacts by first name. On a standard Symbian phone (without a QWERTY keypad) we'd need to press the 7 key four times to tell the phone we wanted the letter "S". That would move the selection to the beginning of all the "S" names in your phonebook, at which point you could choose to scroll down until you found what you wanted.

You could also press the 9 key three times to tell the operating system you wanted "Y" as the second letter. This would likely get you close enough to the name you wanted, but by now you've already used 7 keystrokes just to get to here. However, with a scheme based on predictive text we could type just 3 keys:

7, 8, 5

Instead of moving the selection down, ContactsEx instead reduces the size of the contacts list (or more accurately it narrows it down) to just names that begin with combinations of letters found on the keys pressed. 785 indeed represents SYL, but it can also represent many other letter combinations too. However, virtually none of the other letter combinations appear in names, thus the narrowed list will contain very few entries.

Other key sequences may result in multiple valid letter combinations, but in practice the total number of matches is usually quite small and it can be made even smaller by just pressing another key in the sequence. Finding most names in a small-to-medium sized phonebook can be achieve in just 2 or 3 keystrokes.

The narrowing of the contacts list works for QWERTY keypads too, but the T9-like approach isn't necessary. Narrowing the list of names (rather than just moving down the huge list) does offer advantages in that it clarifies the names that match the letters you've pressed up to that point.

With either type of keypad, you can begin the search by typing the # key. When you do this the list will narrow to included only contacts that are designated as Calling Cards. You are now free to enter further keys to narrow the search further within the context of the Calling Cards. Note that on phones without a pencil key, you may have chosen to switch the mode of the # key act purely as a shift. In this case you can still access this functionality by pressing-and-holding # while simultaneously pressing the SELECT button.

However, the search capabilities of ContactsEx do not end there. Using functions available through the menu you can perform deep searches of the data contained with the contacts. Say for example you remembered that the number you wanted to lookup ended with 1156. There is no way on a native Symbian phone to perform such a search. Symbian doesn't even allow you to search for a complete number, let along a partial one. ContactsEx on the other hand allows numeric searches to be performed easily.

Searching isn't restricted phone numbers. With ContactsEx you can search through every single piece of data stored in the contact (including the text labels of each field). That means you can search based on a street address, a city, a country, an email address, a text note, or any other information contained with a contact.

The result of a search is a list of contacts that contain the matching string. You are then free to treat this list just as you would a full list of contacts, in that you can dial them, send email or SMS to them, edit them, or just drill down to the information in each one. The search results remain valid until you clear them by pressing the Reset softkey.