February 21, 2012

When iOS 5 came, I was surprised by the number of friends I have that had a Twitter page. If you aren’t familiar with the feature in iOS, if your contact has an email in your address book, it will be checked by the Twitter profiles to see one that matches. If it does, it will be added to their contact on your iPhone and their contact photo can be updated with their Twitter photo. This was a great way of adding social media contacts to my friends, but I wanted more. I wanted an address book that used many of the sites I use everyday, multiple times a day even. I found that with Smartr, an address book that accumulates your contacts by social media, including even some of their updates. Let’s take a closer look.

Some Great Features

To work, Smartr uses some of the information found in the native iPhone contact book. This gives you the basis of who will start out in your Smartr contact book. From there, the Smartr application uses email addresses from your contacts to gather social networking websites that they may be apart of. You can also connect websites they are apart of, which will add their most recent information and updates. This will, in the end, allow you to just select a contact and reply to a post or send them a message on the respective site. Thankfully, Smartr uses iCloud!

How To Begin

Before collecting the information of your friends, Smartr wants you information first. To begin, you must add your social networking information. You will have to add your email address, social media websites, etc. In choices for emails, you have many choices, from Gmail to Yahoo, and Outlook in between. Social media choices include Twitter, Facebook, Linked In etc.

Contact Interface

Once everything is compiled, Smartr has a convenient searching tool allowing you to easily retrieve a contact. If you don’t have a lot of contacts, you can manually search by scrolling, like in the native contacts app. Each page will show the contacts image and other compiled information. If the contact has a photo, the source will be shown below the image. If they have a phone number, you can contact straight from the application. There are three tabs at the top, one for profile, another for the history of contact between you both, third is contacts you have in common based on common friends and followers. The history tab gives you a graph of your recent contact, showing when contact has spiked, in a bar graph form.

What I Love

The first thing I love is how free it is. Smartr is one of those free applications that really do work well. However, great free applications come with advertisements, except for Smartr, that’s one thing that threw me by surprise. I also enjoy how I can see the updates from contacts, instead of having to activate another app or Safari. Having in app updates allows for a more productive application.

What I Could Live Without

Well I guess it isn’t something I can live without, but it is something overwhelming, and it’s the amount of features Smartr has. This means not everyone will gravitate on Smartr. However, another thing that seemed a little iffy about Smartr was how everyone’s information is with Smartr, it being internet based as well. This can make many feel a bit cautious. Aside from the set up process being a bit long, Smartr is great for the price.

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