How Easy Is It To Organize Contacts On A Smart Phone? There’s an App for That.

This is a guest post by guest author Vern Marker.

Click image for smartphone info

“Everything has a place and a place for everything” might be something repeated ad nauseum by the grandmothers of the world. When it comes to digital organization – and specifically keeping track of contact information – have so called smart phones actually helped or hurt us?

Though smart phone platforms vary, some significantly, the overall functionality of applications being developed for the business or power user tend to be remarkably similar. Whether one’s phone book is filled with only friends and family, or the contact information of hundreds of clients and potential customers, being able to find and act upon specific entries can often be a challenging nightmare to the average user.

Enter into the equation factors like social media networks, picture sharing sites, and various other community involvement, and one’s contacts numbers could easily climb into the thousands. Granted not everyone wants or needs all 5,000 Facebook friends (if they are so fortunate) in their phone book, but specific friends in that community listing may be the only place they can go to get in touch.

What apps will assist you in organizing
and finding all your contact info?

The question then becomes how to corral all this data and make it easy to use. Enter the application marketplace of the various smart phone devices. Apple has its App Store. Android, it Marketplace. Even Amazon has recently opened an application store of its own.

Within the tens of thousands of offerings in these various repositories one should find more than enough choices in the category of organizing contacts. Following is a listing of a few popular applications and why they are so interesting.

• Native Phone Contact Apps: Many of the latest offerings by mobile phone manufacturers have included in their operating systems a suite of applications the user just might find will do many of the tasks they require. While some native contact applications are rudimentary, more interesting offerings appear every day.
• Google Voice: Though not strictly a contact app in the sense it lists out names and phone numbers, this app will interact with the contact information on ones device and provide for voice and text interactive capabilities with those contacts.
• Business Contact Manager: Actually, BCM is a desktop application which has wisely added a smartphone app for its users to be able to synchronize contact information on the computer with the handheld. This can be a great solution for keeping ones contacts organized along with maintaining notes on interactions.
• Pocket Informant: Windows users with smartphones based upon the Microsoft operating system will appreciate the simplified elegance of this app. In addition to automatically synchronizing ones Outlook contacts, the app will perform a host of other contact organizing tasks.
• Contact Hero: One of the leading management apps for the iPhone, Contact Hero provides strong syncing capabilities between desktop contact applications. Additionally, the power of the app to download contacts from the user’s Outlook Gmail, or Yahoo accounts makes it a convenient one stop shop for all the contacts in ones life. Add to the above the fact Contact Hero provides for note taking relative to individual contact interactions as well as list making capabilities, and this one little app ends up being a big time productivity application any iPhone user would feel good about using.
• As with most things in life, organized, uncluttered spaces tend to lead one towards more creativity and production. Attempting to run a business or be effective in ones career can be made multitudes easier by employing any of the above contact manager applications on a smartphone.Vern Marker is a freelance writer who not only works in creating forms, but works with an online form builder as well. Besides his passion to create web forms, he also loves to write about anything and everything tech related.

Tagged as: android, contacts, organization, smart phones, tech