Review: Groups -- advanced contact management on the iPhone

If you are like me, then you have a lot of entries in the Contacts on your iPhone.  Attorneys and other professionals are always meeting people, be they clients, co-counsel, opposing counsel, consultants, witnesses, etc. and over time the number of entries in your Contacts database can really add up.  Groups is an iPhone app that gives you sophisticated tools for managing your these contacts.

When the developer, Guided Ways Technologies, sent me a review copy of this $4.99 app, I thought it would be good for one thing: making lists of contacts so that I could easily send an e-mail to a group of people at one time.   Groups adds that ability, and does it very well, using drop and drag.  Just hold down your finger on a contact for a second and a picture of a card will pop up, which you can drag to any distribution list that you created in the app.  Once the group is populated with members, you can easily send an e-mail to all recipients of that group, and the app even lets you selectively turn on or off members of that group before it creates the e-mail.  It is a slick implementation that works great.

Little did I know that this one feature, useful though it may be, is just one of the many features of the sophisticated Groups app.  First, this app makes it very easy to get at the information that you have associated with each of your contacts.  Just tap on a contact and a card pops up that gives you a beautiful interface to all of the information that you have for a particular contact.

 

Second, the app has a powerful smart group feature.  Much like a smart playlist in iTunes, you can create a smart group of contacts that matches certain characteristics.  For example, the domain for my law firm is arlaw.com, so I made a smart group that contains all contacts with "arlaw" in their e-mail address.  Instantly, I had a group containing all of my contacts who are my co-workers:

 

The app also comes with some useful built-in smart groups that you can use, modify, or delete.  For example, one smart group lists everyone who has a birthday as a part of their contacts data, and next to each name it shows you the person's current age.  One smart group called Company shows you everyone who has data in the Company field of their contact.  You could just as easily make your own smart group called No Company which lists everyone who does not have a company in their contact data, which is a quick way to see who in your Contacts list needs to have company info added.

And that last point demonstrates one of the most powerful features of this app.  By using smart groups, this app allows you to easily explore your contacts to get a sense of what is missing and to see relationships between your contacts.  A smart group can show you all of your contacts who live in a city, useful when you are planning a trip.  A smart group can show you all of your contacts who don't have a photo, so you can then go in and add a photo.  Just as usefully, it can show you all of the contacts that have a photo.  As I noted in my recent review of the latest version of the Facebook app, that app can now go through all of your contacts and add photos for anyone that it finds on Facebook, even if that person is not one of your Facebook friends.  When I used this feature the other day, it added dozens of correct pictures to my iPhone contacts.  But for a few people, it either got the picture wrong, or it correctly displayed the person's current Facebook picture but that picture is not something that I want to associate with the person, such as a picture of the person's pet.  By looking at a smart group of every contact with a photo, I could quickly find those photos that I don't want to keep and quickly remove those photos from my contact information.  There is really no way to accomplish this task with the built-in Contacts app.

Indeed, it is much easier to do many tasks like this using the Groups app then using Outlook on my PC.  Thus, Groups is an example of an app that is so powerful and easy to use that I actually prefer to accomplish the task on my iPhone rather than use a computer.  That is a sign of a great iPhone app.

And Groups has a bunch of other features as well, many of which I am just starting to discover.  For example, it has a keypad that you can use to dial as an alternative to the regular iPhone Phone app, but as you start to type a number it starts to show the matches in your Contacts to save you the time of typing the rest of the number.  Additionally, it lets you type a name on a keypad using the T9 method, for those of you who enjoyed doing this on a traditional cell phone (press 2 for ABC, press 3 for DEF, etc.)  If you want to bring up Adam, you can just type 2 3 2 and as you are typing the app will bring up all of the matches for those letters such as Adam, Beatrice, Becky, etc.

Note that if you do a search on the Internet for reviews of the Groups app, you will see that most of them are from early 2009 when the app was still missing a lot of features, such as the ability to edit contact information.  The 1.1 version of the app, which came out September 23, 2009, addressed these shortcomings and added several new features.

[UPDATE 1/18/2010:  Philippe Radley notes in a comment that Groups doesn't work with custom ringtones.  I don't use custom ringtones so I haven't noticed this, but if you do you might want to take heed of Philippe's warning.  For example, the 148 Apps website says this on this topic:  "According to the Guided Ways Technologies website, this problem wasn’t a mistake on their part, simply the SDK currently doesn’t allow it, but I will mention it anyway. Groups doesn’t seem to recognize any ringtones other than the preloaded ones on the iPhone, this isn’t a big deal considering you can just go to the 'Contacts' app to change it. But my goal was to completely replace 'Contacts' with this app."]

Groups is an amazingly useful app.  The groups and smart groups features not only make it easy to create lists of contacts, they also make it easier for you to understand what is in your contacts and see relationships between your contacts that you otherwise might not see.  The design of the app is beautiful, and obviously a lot of thought and care went into this.  The app is easily worth $5 for anyone with a large number of contacts on their iPhone.

Click here to get Groups ($4.99): 

Comments

[tony]

I love this application and have been using it for a while! They also have other application for notes and todo lists that are in the same format and really user friendly. This is a must app for me.

[Mike Adams]

How will this work if you are using active sync with Exchange?

[Jeff responds: It works fine, but it is independent. These groups just live on the iPhone. They don't sync over to Exchange, useful as that might be. But of course if you edit a contact within the Groups app, those edits will sync back to the corresponding contact entry in Exchange.]

[Philippe Radley]

I bought this app with great enthusiasm only to discover that I could not use my custom ringtones, as Contacts recognizes the built-ins only. All that you say is right on, but that one defect has led me to remove it.

[Philippe Radley]

Allow me to add two comments:

1. you can preserve your custom ringtones by assigning them in the built-in phone app, as that will overwrite whatever ringtone is selected in Groups; and
2. you need to access the built-in phone app to get to voicemail.

What this means is that Groups is not a complete replacement for the built-in.

[adam]

In my Address Book contacts I keep some notes in the "Notes" field (e.g., listing the name of the person who referred a client to me, or that the person likes to fish or listen to live music -- for bd purposes). I love the search feature on Address Book b/c it will find all those things, but the search feature on the iphone does not go that far into a contact. Will this app do that?

[Jeff Richardson]

Adam: yes, Groups can search your Notes. You can set up a smart group based on Notes and most or all of the fields.

[Norberto Rivera]

Is it possible to print the list of names?

[Alan Harris]

Can this app import a csv or tab delimited 1000+ contact list, each contact with at least home, work & cell numbers where each contact is assigned to one of about 30 groups?