On 1st December 2003 a new law comes into effect in the UK prohibiting drivers from using hand held mobile communications devices whilst driving. Of course, this is an incredibly sensible and long overdue law which will hopefully cause a lot of morons to think a bit more carefully about how they use their phones on the move. For sensible motorists who use their phones responsibly, it means either investing in a fixed installed hands-free system or working out how to use their phone without touching it. As installing a hands-free system costs more than I’d care to pay for any phone, I went for the latter.

I don’t particularly like my phone. It’s a Sony Ericcson T68i, which was the first non-Nokia phone I’d had, owning previously a 3210 and an 8850. The next phone I own will be a Nokia – I should never have strayed. Anyway, I use my T68i with a Sony bluetooth headset whilst driving and so wanted to work out how to activate the voice dialing features. I had voice dialing on the 8850, but it was always complete crap. It would work one time out of ten. After a quick foray through the T68i’s hideous menus I managed to record some voice comments for calling home. Now I can leave my phone in the back and dial by simply pressing the button on my headset.

[Press button] beeep Rachel beeep Home _ beeep_ [rings]

It works every time – seriously, it always works. It’s unbelievably good. This leaves me with a problem. After a year with this phone, I need to get my phone book organised. The T68i enables you to store four numbers against each contact in the book – home, work, mobile and other. For people I call a lot (like Rachel) I have multiple numbers configured, but for the rest I use the phone in a pretty much one-number-per-contact way. My problem arises with companies and organisations. Not everyone I wish to store in my phone book is an individual. For example, my place of work. Sure, I can enter that as a new contact, but which category (Home, Work, Mobile, Other) gets the number? I guess I have some options:

1. Store work’s number as a contact and store the number as one of the categories.
2. Create a contact for myself, and store the number as my work number,
3. Find or create a contract entry for one of my colleagues and store the number as their work number.

Option 3 sounds like it makes sense, but feels a bit like storing the number under ‘P’ for ‘Place of Work’. I’m not sure how to solve this. I guess it comes down to the shape of your phone book. The T68i tries to impose a wide phone book when I need something both wide or long, depending on the circumstance.

So how do you do it? What shape is your phone book?