The main thing I missed when I moved from Windows Mobile (HTC Touch Pro 2) to the iOS (iPhone 4) is being able to see my contact photos on the Address book.
On the default iPhone’s Contact/address book, you can only see a list of your friends’ full names without their photos. ABContacts from Redbits addresses that minor issue and also gives other powerful features such as dynamic groupings, group SMS, and also another thing that I missed: T9 dialling!
On my old Windows Mobile phone, I could do a T9 dialling to quickly call a contact. On the iPhone, however, there is no way to do this on and as such, the Keypad is pretty much useless because you either have to memorize your friends’ mobile numbers or scroll the list on the address book. ABContacts brings T9 smart dialling to the iPhone although unfortunately, Apple doesn’t allow the app to overwrite the default Keypad tab with this lovely feature. To access this feature, you have to open ABContacts and do the dialling from there.
It’s also easy to create new groups and also to add/remove a contact to/from the group in ABContacts. When you already have a group set-up, you can press and hold the Group tab to send an SMS or email to the whole contacts in that particular group. Very handy if you have different people that you normally send messages to regularly.
ABContacts also introduces a new cool feature – dynamic grouping. It basically allows you to group/filter contacts based on some rules, such as the city where they live, the company that they are working at, and many more. So for example, when you travel to a certain city, you can use a quick filter to create a group of your contacts who live in that city and send them messages to meet up. The possibilities are endless here.
The interface is quite nice – very elegant, professional, and overall, I like ABContacts interface the most (compared to a few other contact management apps that I’ve tried). It uses a press-and-hold mechanism to access most of the actions and it is consistent across the whole app. My preference is to actually have all these tabs at the bottom of the app, rather than having to do a press to see the tabs. I find that there is an extra press that I don’t need, in order to keep the layout clean. It’s a matter of preference I guess but nevertheless, thankfully, one more press is all you need to access all the core features.
ABContacts is probably the best contact management (address book) so far that I’ve tried on my iPhone. It looks native, great, easy to use, and elegant. If only Apple allows a third party app to do more or overwrite the default Phone app, then this is the ultimate app to have on your iPhone.
ABContacts; Contacts Manager, Group Text & Email, Dialer, Favorites – Andrea Vettori
Note: Promo code provided for the review
