Smartr Contacts Review

I’ve been trying to find an intelligent and painless way to organize all my contacts from multiple email accounts and my social networks forever. Smartr Contacts, the most appropriately named product on the App Store, offers an ingenious solution.

Like many, I’m making daily professional and personal connections on social networks. While they are not all BFFs, 75% are folks I will want to reach for something or other down the line. It's crazy-hard, though, to remember exactly who everyone is, what we last discussed, or how I even know them with a list nearing 11,000 entries.

That’s where Smartr Contacts came to my rescue. This brilliant little gem allows users to set up as many Gmail - and now Yahoo! Mail - addresses as they have, and the app draws from them all, along with 411 facts from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Once given permission, Smartr Contacts pulls in all the phone numbers, handles and email addresses everyone has scattered everywhere including, following last week's update, from the iPhone address book.

Like Gmail, any keyword from an email will help in the hunt for "that guy with the contacts app", but Smartr Contacts also allows searching by company name, title and other information Gmail doesn’t have access to.

The app integrates with the three social networks’ proprietary iOS apps allowing users to reply to tweets, comment on Facebook photos and see LinkedIn updates easily. Outlook is supported too.

But that’s the pudding; the meat lies in the way each contact comes with a list of common contacts and a history of all previous interactions including exchanged email. One can even reply from the app.

The only thing missing is an iPad version. The app is useable, if heavily pixelated, when upscaled; a universal or iPad-only option would be most welcome.

My personal wish for future development: support for creating groups and compiling and mailing to contact lists from within.

I’ve had Smartr Contacts for only a few weeks, but I can’t remember how I managed without it. I do worry about privacy, but Xobni Corp assures us they don’t resell data. The “re” worries me - this must be monetized somehow - but not enough to forego the magic or even read the fine print.

The fact that Smartr Contacts is free-free - no ads or in-app purchases - with a multi-platform pro version that includes web-based Gmail integration makes this the no-brainer productivity download of 2012 to-date.