Phonebook
The contacts list shows groups at the top like your favorite contacts. Furthermore, the phonebook works like we are used to from Android. It is basically automatically filled with the contacts from accounts you set up on your device. Then it's handy to only show contacts with phone numbers and to merge duplicate contacts. There are also a number of other display and sorting options.
Messaging
The messaging app is not spectacular in terms of functionality but does sort your messages with a nice timeline interface. This is not the case in the email application, but this app is also neat and tidy. Refreshing is easy by dragging the top of the message list downwards. When adding an account you can only choose between Exchange and others. In many cases this doesn't make the setup any easier. Even with our Outlook account the P8 needed multiple attempts to do it automatically. The Gmail app can also be used with other accounts and that makes the setup a lot easier.
For entering text, the P8 is equipped with the Swype keyboard. This has been a favourite of ours for quite some time now, although we have exchanged it for the standard Android 5.0 keyboard. That does not alter the fact that Swype still works very well. Entering text by dragging and dropping from letter to letter is very easy and the appearance and behavior of the keyboard can be easily adjusted. It is possible to enable two input languages at the same time, but also switching between languages is easy by holding down the space bar.