There are many ways we can use our iPhone/iPod touch to connect with friends. These include by email, iMessage, FaceTime, through social networks, and of course, making a call.
Savi People is a new acquaintance app that recently arrived in the App Store. It’s like Apple’s own Contacts app, but with more social functionality.
Created by
MobileLife Studio, the $0.99 app helps you easily organize, view, and communicate with your contacts, Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, and Twitter followers. The result is something special, if not quite perfected.
The first time you enter Savi People, the app automatically adds information from your Contacts app. This includes everything from a contact’s phone number, email, address, and even birthday.
From here, you can add each contact to a group and make them a favorite by clicking a star icon. Additionally, Savi People includes a filtering tool, which comes in handy when you have a lot of contacts.
Best of all, when you click on a contact’s name, you’ll see a row of buttons, each which signifies the type of communication that is possible, by contact.
These include icons for phone, FaceTime, iMessage, and email. In addition, an active pin icon signifies that communicating with the contact through a social network is possible.
Speaking of these social networks, Savi People allows full integration for each. For Facebook and LinkedIn, specifically, this incorporation is most impressive.
Linking either of these accounts and Savi People adds friend information with ease, including their emails, phone number, and website information, when applicable.
Also, if your contact is a member of a group on Facebook, for example, that grouping is also shown, which I found to be a great tool.
Where Savi People breaks down somewhat is with its Twitter integration, but not necessarily for the reason you’d expect. Once linked to your Twitter account, the app organizes tweets by follower, although you can also see your overall feed just as you would with other Twitter apps.
You can also send out new tweets on the fly, which again, adds to the inclusiveness that the app provides.
Even as a Version 1.0.1 release, Savi People works as advertised. However, I was least impressed with its Twitter interface. Using the app to review your Twitter timeline is fine, but I had a difficult time using it to post new tweets. This was mainly due to the app’s smaller than expected icons used for this purpose.
With this in mind, I can’t recommend Savi People as your primary Twitter application. As such, it simply doesn’t provide as robust an experience as does the official
Twitter app or my personal third-party app favorite,
Tweetbot.
Finally, there is one additional point that is worth mentioning.
Come fall, Apple is adding significant Facebook integration with iOS 6. When this happens, your Contacts app will automatically include friend information from this network. When you couple that with its Twitter integration weaknesses, Savi People’s reason for being becomes less clear. Between now and then, it will be interesting to see what new features Savi People gains to keep it relevant.
Savi People is available now at a special price of $0.99 in the App Store.
