Review: WorldCard Contacts

Overview Do you ever go to a conference or expo only to find yourself carrying a pocketful of business cards? Wouldn't you like an easier way to manage all those cards? That's where WorldCard Contacts aims to help. WorldCard Contacts is a contact management app that allows you to organize your contacts into groups, favorites and store a photo of a business card rather than having to carry it around. But do you really need WorldCard Contacts? Lets find out... Features - Sort contacts into groups - Share contacts via email - Save business card photos as a contact - Call, text or email a contact from the app - Create favourites - Recent call list On opening WorldCard Contacts the app will retrieve your contacts and all their info from your iPhone. The first thing you'll probably notice is how similar WorldCard Contacts looks to the phone app that comes with the iPhone. This is because WorldCard Contacts is basically the phone app with a couple of extra features such as groups. Also, although similar, WorldCard Contacts does have a darker interface to the standard phone app. WorldCard has all the features you'd expect from a contacts app; add new contacts, delete old ones, edit contacts as well as share, email, sms and call a contact. Adding, editing and removing works the same as the standard iPhone contacts app. Press the '+' symbol and input whatever data you need such as phone number, email address and contact photo. Contacts that you add will automatically be added to your iPhone contacts as well. WorldCard Contacts also has a keypad for dialling, calling or saving a number as well as a recent call list. Groups is one the features I wish the iPhone had as standard and WorldCard Contacts implements this in an easy to use way. As default there are two groups; iPhone and WorldCard. To see all your groups, press 'all' in the top left of the contacts screen. From here, select 'edit' then press the '+' to add a new group. You can then add and remove contacts from the groups, to make it easier to manage your contacts. The final feature is accessed by pressing the camera icon in the top right corner. Pressing this will present you with the camera so you can take a photo of a business card. Once you have taken a photo, you can crop the image as well as add details that you can read from the photo. Once you have input all the info you want and saved, this contact will then display in the WorldCard Contacts list. Moving this contact from the app to your iPhone contacts is as simple as editing the contact and selecting either move to contacts or copy to contacts. The Breakdown The Good: Having groups of people is a great way to access a specific set of people that you might need to email or phone about something important. The implementation of groups in WorldCard Contacts is easy to use and list can be renamed and edited quickly. The photo option is also a real time saver. By quickly snapping a business card you don't need to take the card with you and you can always go back to it at a later stage. The Bad: Although above I sang the praises of the groups functionality, one thing does bother me. There is no way to send an email or sms to everyone in the group. Having to go through each person in the list can become quite tedious. This is not to say I don't like the groups feature but I would like to see more functionality. The Verdict WorldCard Contacts is a nicely designed app with a few extra features over the iPhone contacts app and having groups is a nice addition. However, having to keep going back to the app after each phone call or email becomes very tiresome. Also, as nice as having a camera built into the app is, I can't help but think that I would (and have done in the past) just used the iPhone's camera to snap a business card, then reference it when I get home. Having said all that, WorldCard Contacts is a smooth app to use, and if you want to easily organize your contacts into groups, for the price, you can't really go wrong.