Do you wish you could do more with your contacts on your iPhone or iPod Touch like sorting them by state, sending out a group email or see upcoming events like birthdays and anniversaries?  Fast Contacts does that and more and for the next 5 to 7 days is free, otherwise it costs $2.99.

I downloaded Fast Contacts a couple of days ago when it first became free and have been very happy with the app as well as the response from the company when i had a question (more about that later).  The first thing I noticed was a number on the icon badge which represented the number of upcoming events, a couple of friends’ birthdays.  What a nice surprise!  I had been looking for an application that kept track of birthdays for me.

The second thing I checked out was the coverflow option to scan my contacts.  All you need to do is open up the app, be on a page with a list of contacts and turn your iPhone/iPod Touch landscape and coverflow appears, just like when you are browsing songs in the iPod app.  A lot of my contacts don’t have photos so it was nice to find that i can show only contacts with photos and then brush through the coverflow.  Just think about it, you can’t remember a contacts name but what they look like and know you took a photo of them (you must be very popular!), you can just flip through till you find the photo of them and voila, you have a name!

With Fast Contacts you can:

• Visualize contacts using coverflow.
• Be notified of events like birthdays and anniversaries.
• Search your contacts by name, company, phone numbers, address, title and even notes.
• Sort contacts alphabetically, by events, prefix, first name, last name, suffix, nickname, job title, department, city, state, zip and country.
• Add, modify and delete contacts.
• Send out email by group (groups must be created outside of Fast Contacts).
• Choose from 5 different themes to display contacts.

I like Fast Contacts.  It feels like I have more control of my contacts than with the Apple app.  There are a few things to note or ask for.

• I noticed that my default ringtone within the app was set as Marimba which it isn’t in my settings.  I use Custom Ringtones for both my default and many of my contacts.  While Fast Contacts doesn’t display Custom Ringtones it also doesn’t change your ringtones.  I sent an email to Spiceloop, the creators of the app and they responded quickly that it was a limitation of Apple’ iPhone software development kit.  While you can change your ringtones in Fast Contacts I won’t because of the limitation on Custom ringtones
• The buttons on the status bar are small, I wish they were a bit larger to work with.
• It would be nice to have the option to receive push notifications for upcoming events.

If you can get Fast Contacts while it is free I will say you are getting a great bargain.  Otherwise you will have to pay the price to have what Fast Contacts bill themselves as, a “Contacts application on steriods!”

Rating: (4.5/5)