RSS

Address Book is the next step in Android contact & communication management

Tue, Oct 27, 2009 | by Andrew Kameka

Lifestyle

Address Book is the next step in Android contact & communication management

Streamlined communication is the future of digital interaction. While the list of ways we communicate– calls, text, email, Facebook, Twitter – are sure to increase, there will be a need to centralize those communications. Asurion Software has joined the fray of companies looking to make the future now with its new Android app Address Book.

Address Book is a contacts-management system that cross-matches your contacts from various services known as “Mix-ins.” The app loads contacts from Amazon, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube, then auto-matches the names to create a central, detailed profile of the people you know. Users can unmatch profiles or manually pair names to get further details, and backup this information by syncing data onto Asurion’s servers. From there, users can read tweets, check status, see videos, respond to texts, and see a detailed log of interactions with others.

“I’ve seen this already with webOS, Blur, and Sense, haven’t I?” Not exactly. While the idea of streamlined communication isn’t new, Address Book gives users a great deal of control in determining how they will use this “people-centric view of relationships.” It’s not a giant social-networking stream; it’s a user-defined watchdog for various connections. Rather than worry about every detail of social networking, Address Book provides options about who and what to be notified about; only follow tweets from this group and photos from this person.

For instance, you may not care about status updates from your Facebook-obsessed sister, but you may want to know when she adds pictures to Facebook or a video to YouTube showing off her newborn. You may even want to know when your nephew updates his wish list on Amazon to help figure out what to buy him this holiday season. Clicking on a contact will bring up the relevant content you define through Mix-in auto-matches.

Address Book also features a business-friendly component that provides direct access to certain features. Aside from a Yellow Pages Mix-in for business information, Address Book features a “Smart Business Contact” feature that can locate businesses someone frequents. Adding a Smart Business Contact brings up that coffee shop or restaurant in Google Maps, allowing users to find the nearest Starbucks or Domino’s Pizza.

Asurion gave me a preview of Address Book and pointed out another potential benefit to dealing with businesses. A traveler may sometimes need to contact his airline for a number of reasons. The traditional way of solving the problem is to dial the airline’s number and navigate through its automated operator, which can often prove frustrating. Address Book has the potential to offer more than just a phone number and give shortcuts to services like flight schedule or baggage check.

I have used Address Book for my default Contacts management app for about a week now. Though I continue to use Twitter and Facebook apps for real-time interaction, I like the aggregated history of seeing people’s recent activity and catch things that I may have missed. The dialer works well and I love being able to direct call someone simply by gesturing to the right when scrolling through the contacts list. Most important of all, I haven’t experienced any adverse drains on battery life or speed. Even better, Asurion has informed me that it is working on allowing more developers to incorporate their websites and services as Mix-Ins.

Overall, Address Book is definitely something that I would recommend to other users. It should be available to Android Markets in most English-speaking countries right now. Under the “About the developer” section of in Address Book’s Android Market listing, click “View more applications” to download the Mix-Ins.

, , , ,

This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.

6 Comments For This Post

  1. @TattierPub Says:

    bummer nowhere to be found in the market and the barcode doesn't work either.

  2. teedertot Says:

    perfect! exactly what i needed

  3. @nabgilby Says:

    I and the AddressBook team would like to thank everyone for trying and giving feedback on AddressBook. Or at a minimum, trying to find it!

    It’s only been a few days but we’ve learned a lot and will be responding to feedback with improvements in short order. One issue that we’ve seen in this blog is “where in the heck/he__ is the AddressBook app?”. We made a mistake and were not as explicit as we should have been that only Android 1.6 is supported by AddressBook at this time.

    We realize this is a disappointment to HTC Hero (guess who LUVs her Hero, me) and Moto Cliq users. However, try as we might, there was a severe bug introduced with Android 1.5 that added significant instability into our app, especially with installation and deletion of mixins. We worked with Google, submitted a fix for Andorid on 1.5, and while Google was able to respond for 1.6, there was not an opportunity for them to get the fix into an update for 1.5.

    If any of you out there are willing to join our “guinea” program (very pre-release), and likewise are willing to follow a strict set of guideline for installing/de-installing with “as is” ground rules, please email us at addressbook.support@asuion.com to discuss use on 1.5. If not, we’re working day and night to be ready for 2.0 and still taking stock of what we might do for 1.5.

    Keep the feedback coming, we are listening,
    -Nancy

  4. Brett Says:

    Nancy,
    I'm new to the android interface and must say I love it so far, except . . . I just bought the Cliq by motorola, love it, but the contact manager does not allow you to sort your contacts by business? Are there any applications that have a better contact manager that would allow me to sort by either company or name?

    Brett

  5. Chris Kuivenhoven Says:

    Correction in case anyone else wants to use it: addressbook.support@asurion.com is the correct e-mail address.

  6. Matt Says:

    Any word on when or if this will be available for 2.0 so the droid users can try it out?

Leave a Reply