Contact Find 4+

I have tried a number of things to get this app to work but it crashes after about 5 seconds. I have removed it and reinstalled it with no luck. I thought It might work with the most recent update - But no luck. This was a complete waste of money. Some reviews I read indicate that the program will not work with a large number of contacts. I have 243 and do not think that is a large number compared with some of the notes in the reviews. The features this app claims to offer are nice but don't waste your money because clearly this app was not tested well and was poorly written.

For Palm users or x-Palm users, here is the App we have been waiting for on the iPhone. Keep in mind it only searches the iPhone Contact List (not the yellow “Notes” files on your iPhone). But it’s the first search tool that can search all the various fields in your Contact List, not just the name field.

For those that don’t understand the need for this: Say you had a company install a beautiful skylight in your home two years ago, and you put the company info into your contact list along with the word “Skylight” in the memo field. At dinner your friends talk about putting in a skylight and ask you for the name of the company that did yours. You could manually scroll through hundreds of your contacts like a Rolodex in hopes of coming across it, or using this App, just type in “Skylight” and retrieve the information immediately. This is one strength of the Palm platform, and now the iPhone can have that same functionality.

The App must load your hundreds of contacts into memory each time you open the program, so you must wait 15 seconds or more before the search can take place. However, during that time you can type ahead into the search field and have your form completed and ready to tap “Search.”

After the iPhone 2.1 update, Apps no longer crash. This works just as advertised.

Contact Find originally had it all except for speed. It searches in all fields and is very efficient. It you, as I, use the notes field as a free-form database for all kinds of information, you need a fast and reliable search engine to find things. Contact Find now qualifies. I have about 1,300 contacts, some of them with a large amount of text in the notes field. I can enter any string and it is found in very few seconds. It does this by keeping available the last set of Outlook contacts that was fed into it so that it does not have to reload them when it receives a query. Thus, it is a good idea manually to order it to update its contacts once in a while. Otherwise the newest information will not be available. That is a small priice to pay!