Buzz Contacts: Making The Contact App More Efficient

I did a post a little while back on an application that replaced the Address Book on your iPhone, and it seems that these 3rd party apps are starting to gain more and more traction. Developers are starting to see the need for a better address book and are doing something about it. I, for one, love Apple and its products and software, and I am really hoping that these apps push them to make the iPhone OS better sooner rather than later.

In this review, I look at an application that is almost the complete opposite of the one I recently reviewed. It is called Buzz Contacts, and it is developed by the same guys that brought you Agenda, a great looking calendar application for the iPhone.

Setting Up Buzz Contacts

When you first fire up Buzz Contacts (referred to as Buzz from here on out) you are asked to create a group using the contacts you have in your address book on your iPhone. Once you decide on a contact you can only choose one action for that person as you are creating the group.

Let’s say I am starting a group for my family and I select my wife and her phone number. I’m then prompted to choose whether the contact will be to call her or text her — it cannot be both. If I want to do both, I need to create two different contacts in the group to do this. I found this rather bothersome to do and it really almost turned me off from using the app as a whole.

Each page can hold up to four different contacts, and if you want to add more than that you have to use another page. You can swipe through them to select your contact and the first page lists all of the contacts that are in the group. I found this page very handy especially if your group is large or if you don’t want to swipe through multiple pages.

Actions

There are a variety of different actions that you can do with Buzz that make it possible that you don’t necessarily have to use the phone or contacts application. One of my favorite actions was the group emailing and texting feature. With this, you could choose to email or text the whole group or you can select certain people as well. I found this feature very handy to have and it really helped me to set up my groups in a way that I could utilize this to the best of its ability.

If you don’t want to message a lot of people you can always still email or text one person like you normally would on your iPhone. What Buzz does is that it gives you a small set of prewritten messages that you can use to fire off a quick email or text to someone, or you can write the message yourself. It also gives you the option to create your own prewritten message so next time you are on the go and need to do a quick response back to someone, you have that message handy. The other nice part is that all your emails and texts are done and sent from within Buzz so you don’t have to go outside of the app to do any of these actions.

Lastly, you have the good ol’ fashion dialer mode if you just want to dial someone and call them. What is nice about this action is that when you start to type someone’s number in, Buzz automatically lists out possible phone numbers you are trying to call from the ones in your Address Book app. It will list phone numbers based on the number you pressed and the corresponding letter(s). For example, if you press the #2, it will find contacts that have a “2″ or that have the letters “A,” “B,” or “C” in them.

Thoughts

The big question I ask myself when I was testing Buzz out was, “Can this app make me stop using the native apps on my iPhone to do the same tasks?” I still am not sure if it can or not because I still use the phone, messaging, and email apps for other tasks that this app cannot do.

I definitely think Buzz has some great features that make it stand out more than other contact applications. I love the minimal design of the app, how easy it is to use and I really like the group messaging features. I do wish I could have more than four contacts on a page and that they could have more than just one action item associated with them. I would have also liked to see social networking built into this app as well, by being able to see someone’s Twitter or Facebook and maybe message them from within the app.

Conclusion

Overall, Buzz is a good looking and very useful application for the iPhone and I think is off to a great start. There are other contact apps out there that do very similar things, but the simplicity and minimal design of the app is what attracted me to it. You can get it on the App Store for $0.99, which I think is the perfect price point for an app like this.

Do you have a favorite contact application that you like and do you think you are going to try out Buzz? If so, feel free to leave us a comment and let us know.