Review: Inesoft Address Book

Posted by: dgoldring on Jan 06 2008 - 2,075 views

Lately, I have been on a mini crusade to improve my access to my address book and contacts on my Sprint Mogul.  Let’s face it, the default address book is just not cutting it.  I want something which will be more powerful and easier to use.  At about the same time, I received an email from Inesoft, offering the opportunity to review their address book program.  Well, of course, I jumped on this peanut butter in my chocolate moment, and immediately set out to check out what they had to offer.

Installation and Registration: Installation occurs via the usual methods.  Download the program to your desktop and install it onto your mobile device via ActiveSync or Windows Mobile Device Center.  Give it a test drive and kick the tires for 15 days.  After that, you will need to purchase a registration key in order to keep using the program.  You can also download the .cab file directly to your device.

Contact Manager: When you open the Address Book, you will be automatically sent to the default screen.  This screen is divided into three sections.  The top half of the screen consists of a list of contacts, showing about five at a time.  Beneath that is the Phone Bar, allowing you to switch to other sections of the Address Book (call history, dialer and photo favorites).  The rest of the screen consists of an alpha-numeric T9 keypad,which is quite finger friendly.  Use this to quickly search the list.  Like any T9 keypad, each number contains three letters.  Pressing the number two will narrow the list to any entries containing the letters "A", "B", or "C".  Pressing the number 5 will then look within the previously narrowed list for entries containing the letters, "J", "K", or "L". 

While this provided a relatively easy and efficient means of quickly searching the list, the T9 pad takes up a lot of space on the screen.  Fortunately, the view is completely customizable.  That Phone Bar can be removed to free up space.  The T9 screen can be minimized to a small search bar at the top of the screen or even removed entirely.

From this main screen, you also have a considerable opportunity to manipulate the information displayed.  You can choose to display a one line entry with the contact’s name and primary means of contact (phone number, email address).  Or, for a slightly more expanded layout, choose the two line layout which includes a photo where one has been included.  To maximize the information displayed, you can even activate the preview panel (Shown above), which will show an expanded view of the selected contact. 

Just tap any entry to bring up the full contact card.  You can even sort the list by displaying only selected categories.  Finally, You can create a new entry or edit an existing one.  I was extremely impressed by the level of customization on this main screen.  This means the address book is always working for you, rather than forcing you to work around its display limitations.

Of course, viewing your contacts does little good if you cannot reach them quickly from here.  There are two ways to do so.  From the contact list, tap and hold on the contact to open a context menu from which you can dial, email, or SMS, You can also open the full contact card and simply tap on the phone number to dial or email address to open a new message.  One frustration I did notice here was that it opens the default dialing screen instead of the built in Inesoft Address Book dialer.  Likewise, when I selected an email, it automatically used the Outlook email program, despite the fact that I have set FlexMail as my default program.  There should be a way to customize which programs are used for these functions, especially since Address Book has a dialer built into the program. 

Dialing Interface: As long as we are on the subject of the dialer, let’s take a look at the one included with Inesoft Address Book.  I really liked the dialing interface.  It has nice large buttons, and even allows you to send an SMS right from the dialing screen.  Unlike the default dialer (right)on my Mogul, it has nice finger friendly buttons which make it extremely easy to use.

Once you have dialed the call, however, it reverts back to the default interface while the call is in progress.  Additionally, there is no quick and easy way to reach the Inesoft dialing interface from the Today Screen.  Pressing the green talk button opens the default dialing interface, and there is no way to remap this button (I shouldn’t say no way as I am sure someone will prove me wrong with a registry hack).  Of course, you can map it to a different button, however, it seems exceedingly inefficient to me to have two buttons mapped to essentially the same feature.  As such, as much as I liked this dialing interface, it sat largely unused on my device.  I felt this halfway implemented feature did not do justice to the rest of the program.  Inesoft should find a way to fully integrate the dialing interface and allow it to replace the default dialer, or remove it from the program.  As much as I liked it, it is simply too inaccessible to reach when I need to make a quick call.

Call History: Inesoft Address Book also offers a nice call history screen.  From here, you can see (color coded) all of the necessary information for your calls (incoming and outgoing).  I liked this screen because it fit in well with the overall theme of the program.  It uses the same finger friendly layout as the rest of the program, which makes it easy to return a missed call at any time.  That being said, this screen really does not offer any information or functionality which was not already included in the default Windows Mobile 6 call history.

  

Photo Favorites: I have long been a fan of photo contacts.  They are, in my opinion, the easiest way to initiate a call in Windows Mobile.  The photo contacts (or favorites) in Inesoft Address book are really very nice.  They are arranged in a 4×4 grid, for a total of 16 finger friendly photos.  Just tap the photo to initiate a call.  Tap and hold to select a different phone number for that contact, or to send an SMS message.  Unfortunately, there is no option to send an email from here.

Like I said, I found the layout to be exceptionally easy to use.  However, just as with other features offered by this program, I simply did not find it to be convenient to access.  There is no Today Screen Plug-In or other quick access route to the photo contacts.  Instead, you must open the entire Address Book program and then switch to the photo favorites view, a process which can take five seconds.  Compare this with the almost instantaneous access to your photo contacts from Mobile Shell, and the convenience factor decreases significantly.  In order for this feature to be useful, it must be better integrated into your system via a Today Screen Plug-In.

Caller ID: Caller ID is probably my favorite feature of the Inesoft Address Book.  The default caller id on my Mogul is really not very good.  A small notification pops up on the bottom of the screen, displaying the caller’s information.  The two soft keys allow you to answer or ignore the call.  The caller id offered by Inosoft on the other hand, takes over your entire screen.  A picture (if one is assigned to the contact) of the contact is splashed upon the center of the screen with a large green answer button and a large red ignore button.  This means, at a glance, I call tell exactly who is calling and easily answer or screen the call without fumbling for the soft keys or trying to discern the small text on the bottom of the screen before the phone stops ringing.

Call Filtering: Inesoft Address Book also offers a powerful call filtering feature.  Call filtering conveniently taps into the same categories used by your Personal Information Manager.  If a category is enabled, then a caller assigned to that category will ring through to your phone.  If the category is not enabled, then the call will be blocked.  By using your existing categories, Inesoft makes it extremely easy and intuitive to determine which calls will ring through.  In addition to your categories, Inesoft also recognizes that you may receive calls from unknown or unassigned numbers.  As such, Inesoft also offers the option of enabling (or disabling) private numbers, unknown numbers, and numbers which are not assigned to any category. 

Ring Settings: Another area in which Inesoft does a great job of integrating into your device is its handling of your phone’s ringer.  From the Address Book menu, you can assign a different ringtone to each category in your contacts list (you can also set ringtons for individual callers by editing that contact’s information).  I really like setting ringtones by category.  While some of my contacts will warrant an individual contact, most will not.  By allowing me to personalize my ringtone by categories, Inesoft allows me to determine, without so much of a glance, whether or not to answer the call. In addition to ringtones, you can also set the volume of the ringer.  I really did not see the need to do so, however, as the ringer is easily controlled on the fly by simply tapping the volume icon on the top of my screen (some devices even allow you to do so with a hardware button).  Finally, you can also determine the ring type.  Will the call vibrate?  Ring?  Vibrate and then ring?  Inesoft offers eight different options here (in addition to defaulting to your system settings).  It would have been nice, however, if you could set the ring type by category, like you can with ringtones.

Conclusion: I though Inesoft Address Book was a fantastic contact manager.  Unfortunately, however, it suffers from the same issue which plagues many Windows Mobile programs: it tries to do too much.  While some of the features in this package are fantastic, and work and perform admirably; they are overshadowed by those features which are not fully developed enough.  For example, while I really liked the photo contacts and dialer interface, they require considerably better integration with the entire system in order to be useful.  The inaccessibility of these features can overshadow the finger friendly and easy to use contacts interface, caller ID, call filtering, and other features.  Of course, this problem could be relatively easy to overcome by adding a Today Screen Plugin for the photo contacts, and finding a way to replace the default dialing interface with the Inesoft dialing interface.  Nonetheless, you do not need to knock it  out of the park in order to have a solid hit, and I did feel Inesoft achieved a solid hit with this one.  I’ll be watching to see what improvements they make with the next version.

Vital Stats

Name: Inesoft Address Book 2.0

Developer: Inesoft

Price: $24.95

Where to Buy: Inesoft

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