Face Contact – A brand new product from CNetX.
So here it is..Face Contact!
If you like the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch interface, you are going to love this latest contact manager for Windows Mobile. It is a today plugin, which means it runs on your today screen, and is always available to you at the press (or flick)of a single finger.
People with a HTC device are already familiar with the HTC plugin which also gives you the opportunity to manage your contacts with photos or images, but you can only add a limited number of contacts. Likewise, other plug-ins, such as Spb’s Mobile Shell 2 offer this functionality, but with limitations. These limitations, which exist in most photo contact managers today, is one of the problems CNetX hoped to solve with Face Contacts, which allows you to view all your contacts on the today screen at the same time. Let’s see what it looks like.
Here are the features shown by the CNetX website:
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Today screen integration
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Full integration with Outlook Mobile
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Sort contacts instantly
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Kinetic scrolling with 3D rendering and index tracking
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Jump quickly to any position/index in your contact list
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Single Key calling and Shortcut Menu
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Customize the look and feel to fit your Today screen
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Contact Manager
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Adjust, replace and remove pictures
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Use it with any contact: the Icon Gallery
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Adjust motion and index tracking parameters
Contacts
Like many contact managers, Face Contact does not require you to enter any new or separate contact information. Just select one of the contacts already saved on your device and you are ready to go. It uses exactly the same information you entered with Outlook on your desktop PC. The only thing you have to do is add the contacts to the application, by selecting. Well I’m a great guy, and I’ve got a lot of friends, and this program makes it as easy as a few simple taps to load my contacts. This did take some time, because you have to select your contacts and add photos individually.
So, let’s take a look at how you can get your friends and family residing directly on your today screen. If your contact already has a picture associated with it, you can just leave the settings on “default,” and it will be automatically loaded. But if you want to set your contact up with a new or different picture, you can select any photos saved on your device.
Of course, using a new photo also gives you also the opportunity to be a little creative with the picture. Let’s take a look at what you can do to make your photo contacts look even better with Face Contact:
- Cropping — If your picture has a lot of empty space around the character, you can easily crop the image to your desired measures.
- Rotating — If the picture is taken vertically you don’t need a PC to make it fit horizontally
- Change the shape of the picture from square (default) to cylinder, circle, or other shapes.
- Select a picture from there own gallery — This is perfect for assigning pictures to utilities and other services which you might call frequently, not to mention your friends with no pictures. While I do not anticipate using this feature, it does shows how the developer helps you to manage your contact on a perfect way.
- Edit or modify the photo directly from the context menu.
- Call, IM, email, and more directly by tapping the contact. Not everyone uses their device solely for e-mail, and I really appreciated the fact that the user can choose several options when selecting a contact on their today screen.
Visual and Performance
The visuals and animations are great! I was extremely impressed by how this program looked on my device. This plugin gives me the option of creating a little extra atmosphere right there on my Windows Mobile device. In combination with the touch of your fingers or stylus it gives a great animation when scrolling through your contacts. I love it!
But such nice visuals requires hard work of your device, and will test even the hardiest devices. Luckily for the ones who own an older device, there are quite a few settings which are under your control, such as:
- Every contacts picture has a nice reflection on its “floor.” You are able to adjust the size and transparency according to the reflections of your contacts.
- Fast rendering mode requires less of your device, and increases readability. However, the result can be a decrease in the graphic resolution.
I didn’t need to adjust any of these settings for my device. (HTC TYTN2 400MHz). The application worked smoothly and it had no problems at all scrolling through all of my contacts.
What I didn’t liked was the fact that the plugin window turns blue when selected. And there is no other way to undo this then by starting another application. This might be a function of Windows Mobile but I felt it hurt Face Contacts. The main reason I use this application are the visuals. I would think twice before using a program that is going to drop a giant blue screen in the middle of my today screen. And when you select a contact, the name appears underneath the picture which creates a larger plugin. I’m careful with my todayscreen space and this takes a lot space for just a contact manager. I don’t like scrolling on the todayscreen.
Scrolling
This application gives you the option of adding all of your contacts to the todayscreen plugin. That means a lot of pictures! Some people have lots of friends to add, some have a few. To maximize efficiency of the scrolling ability, there are a lot of settings that help you finding the right contact in a minimum amount of time.
First, you can adjust the scroll speed and distance. You can make it scroll faster when you have a lot of contacts, or slower when there are only a few. Another way of scrolling when you use a lot of contacts is using a keyboard/soft-keyboard. Simply press the appropriate alphabetical key and you will instantly scroll to the right place.
When scrolling rapidly through the list, Face Contact displays a single character index-tracking indicator, which provides an effective clue of the current position in the list. If you are a common user of Face Contacts, then you may want to try doing this is predictive scrolling mode. With this, you can just tell it where to stop. If it stops on the wrong contact, you can just give another swing to it. This is a great time saver. The default setting, however, is progressive scrolling, which just shows the instantaneous position in the list. So its like Roulette, you can’t see which number the ball will fall on until the wheel has stopped turning.
Conclusion:
Face Contact is a nice graphic program, designed to manage your contacts in an unlimited and visual way. It works like its supposed to work, and its totally adjustable to your personal belongings. It takes a little while to add all your contacts to the application, but it is well worth the effort of doing so. If you like great graphics and animation, and need an easy way to manage your contacts, this could be the one for you!
What I Liked:
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Love the visual animation
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Performance is good
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Uses same contact information as your text-based contacts application
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Numerous features and options
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Many ways to scroll effectively and quickly through your contacts
What Needs Improvement
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There should be an option to add all your contacts at the same time to Face Contacts
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When selected, the plugin turns blue
Vital Stats:
Name: Face Contacts
Developer: CNetX
Version number: Version 1.00 – Build 121
Platform tested: Windows Mobile 6 Professional (5.2.1620)
Performance: QUALCOMM(R)7200- 400MHz – 128 MB RAM
Other available platforms: Windows Mobile 5
Where to buy: www.cnetx.com
Price: $14.95
Trial version: 10 day evaluation with full features. English version
[Note: Images in this post were provided by CNETX]
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Niek,
Great review, and a pretty nice program as well. I really like the way you can get from the picture to the email/text quickly. It seems like it would save navigating through 4 screens that way.
I agree, I like the animations, but the blue plugin didn’t bother me so much.
Earlier today, I received an email from CnetX, the developers of Face Contact. They offered some additional thoughts in response to this review, which I thought were helpful. I am posting their thoughts in full and unedited.
1) The “giant blue screen in the middle of your today screen”
This is the selection color used by your theme. For instance, if you select the “Guava Bubbles” theme that comes with every device, the selection color will also change accordingly.
The same solid selection color is used by most plugins to give a clue of their selection status. Just try to move around the plugins using the up and down cursor keys, and you will see what I mean.
Of course, any plugin may bypass this default behavior if desired, and in the future we may actually add an option and let the user decide if he/she prefers the background to be transparent in all circumstances. But this may have a few side-effects.
When Face Contact is selected as the active plugin it intercepts the Start Call button so that you can start a call with a simple key press. It also intercepts other keyboard events (such as scrolling via cursor keys or jumping to a specific initial in the contact list) and it overrides the Today menu bar (so the SIP can be accessed if the device has no keyboard). Knowing that the plugin is selected provides a clue that such actions can be performed.
Furfthermore, most users have complex and colorful background and some even use a photograph as the Today screen background. As long as everything is static, displaying contacts’photos on top of such backgrounds may be cool and sharp looking because of the 3D rendering and reflection effects, which give the impression of a different plane and perspective.
But as soon as you start scrolling through your contacts, a colorful background may be very disturbing, as it is more difficult to recognize photos or to read the index-tracking letter as it changes. This is especially true if the Today background is a photograph.
So, switching to the solid selection color defined by the theme has the interesting side-effect of improving the ergonomics of interaction.
2) “I’m careful with my today screen space and this takes a lot of space for just a contact manager”
The first assertion (”I’m careful with my today screen space”) is something subjective so it’s not debatable. But please note that there are quite a few people displaying huge digital or analog clocks on their today screen, and these often take much more space than Face Contact to convey little information (only the time in most cases). The same applies to plugins with weather forecast (which use at least as much space as Face Contact), or news feeds, and so on.
The second assertion (”this takes a lot of space for just a contact manager”) is not subjective, as it is easily measurable. The standard Contacts application requires the whole screen, and this actually applies to just about all “contact managers” I’m aware of: they would never have a chance to fit within the Today screen.
Furthermore, in its standard view (with contacts displayed by Name), on a typical 240×320 device, the standard Contacts application displays 8 contacts at a time (per screen). On a square screen device, such as a Treo, the Contacts app only shows 5 contacts. Face Contact displays 7 contacts in all circumstances, and even more when in landscape mode or on a hi-res device), In other words, Face Contact displays about the same number of contacts of the standard Contacts app, yet it uses just a small portion of the screen.
Not too bad for a “contact manager”.
3) “There should be an option to add all your contacts at the same time”
You are absolutely right. Actually, in the original design, Face Contact wasn’t even supposed to have an “Add Contact” command, and all existing contacts were added automatically the very first time the plugin was invoked.
BUT, when we were considering this approach, we also planned to have a “Filter By Category” option. Then we decided to leave such filtering out of this first release, and, lacking such “filtering capability”, we thought that automatically adding all contacts at once was simply too much at this stage.
Hence, as it is now, you have to explicitely “add” contacts that you wish to use with Face Contact.
Nevertheless please note that this doesn’t imply that you need to take a day off to add all your contacts to Face Contact the first time you install it.
A very reasonable approach to using Face Contact can be easily described as follows:
- You start by adding the contacts that you interact with frequently.
- Whenever you need to call or write to a contact that’s not in the list, rather than launching the standard “Contacts” application, you simply use the “Add Contact” command of Face Contact to lookup the contact.
- This requires just about the same number of taps or keystrokes that you would perform to launch and lookup a contact with the standard Contacts app, but…
- as a byproduct, not only you will get to the contact that you need to call, but this will also be added to Face Contact, so it will be available for any further use.
In other words, you can easily increase the list as needed, when needed.
Thanks again for your review.
Best regards,
Agostino Morreale
I tried out the trial version and loved it. This is on the way to being a “Must-Have” application. The animation is smooth, can be used with a finger and it sits nicely on the today screen. What more could you want?!
Oh, and a very nice review too, Niek
I agree. The only reason I have not tried it, yet, is that the 15 spaces in Mobile Shell 2 are plenty for me. If I needed more numbers, then this is definately the direction I would look.
Doug