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A question that we get fairly frequently is about adding custom ringtones and pictures to specific people in your address book for the BlackBerry 8800 series. For instance (totally true story) for some of my extended family members, the Green Acres theme song is their ringtone (and a totally long story). One of my best friends has “Smooth Criminal” for his ringtone with a picture of the two of us together at an event last year (trust me, the song definitely fits).

Being able to customize your address book is pretty cool. Not only does it make it easy to know who is calling, it also makes it easy to know who to ignore as well (not that we’re advocating that of course).

Go to any entry in your address book and click on the menu key and choose edit. Once you’re at the edit screen, click the menu key again and select “add custom phone tune” and then choose a ringtone from the list (note, we have another entry on how to get or create custom ringtones).

If you want to change the ringtone at a later time, simply go to the edit screen of the entry you wish to change and scroll down to the “custom phone tune” area at the bottom of the entry and hit the trackball when “moused over it”. You could also choose to hit the menu key and then hit “change option” to get to the same list.

To delete a custom ringtone from a specific entry, mouse over the field and then hit the menu key and then “delete field” from the menu list. This removes any custom tone from being associated with this entry.

To add a custom picture for an address book entry, you’d follow the same steps above, except once at the edit screen, you’d hit the menu key and choose “add picture”. Just pick a picture from those pre-loaded on your device, crop it (they have a nice handy cropping tool with the ability to rotate and zoom – or un-zoom – the picture) and click “crop and save” and wallah… you now have a picture assigned to that person.

If you want to change the picture in the future, you’ll need to “mouse over” the picture on the edit screen of the entry you’re on, press the menu key and choose to replace, save or delete the picture from the menu that appears.

So there you go. Now you can pimp your address book to tell you in musical, graphical and textual format who is calling you.

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