Review: Communicate Speed Dial

Speed dial apps have been around for some time for webOS. Despite the fact that these apps have been out there for so long I had not downloaded one until a week ago. I never really felt the need for one as the universal search in webOS has always worked fine for me. However, when I came across Communicate Speed Dial by Newness Development I figured it was about time to give one of these apps a try. The fact that this app is getting rave reviews in the Palm App Catalog didn’t hurt its chances of me downloading it either! So, once again I tapped on the good ol’  ”shopping bag” and downloaded me yet another app to add to my ever expanding repertoire.

My initial impression of this app was that I hated it. However, being the diligent reviewer that I am I still had to put this thing through its paces. The reason I hated this app so much wasn’t the developers fault at all. It’s because I have always hated setting up and organizing contacts. When I purchased my Pre that was all taken care of because my phone book from my old Palm Centro was put onto my webOS device by the Sprint store that I purchased it at. Synergy took care of the contacts that did not get transferred over for me. However, an app like this requires that you go through your current contact app and find the contact you want to add. It sounds simple but when you have 20-30 contacts that you want to add it can become a real pain! Like I said, this is not at all the developer’s fault, it is my own laziness that made me upset.

All laziness set aside, the developer has made setting up your contacts as painless as possible. The first thing you must do when you fire up this app is set up the category that you would like to start adding contacts to by touching the manage groups icon. From there you can set up the name of the category and the background color of that category. Once you have chosen a name and color scheme for the category you can add contacts to it by pressing the little plus icon in the lower left of the screen. This will take you to your normal contacts app where you can select the desired contact. It’s that simple to get your contacts set. If you want to make more than one category press the name box at the top of the screen which shows a drop down to go back to the manage groups page.

So I finally get all my contacts set up in their proper categories and decide to start using this app. This is the part where I got frustrated to the point of almost giving up. I tap on the contact and get a drop down of all the contact info I have for that particular person. Then I had to tap on that person’s phone number only to be brought to a dial confirmation box! That is two clicks too many in my honest opinion. However with enough fiddling around I discovered that you could star the particular contact info that you want to access the quickest. Also in the preferences menu you can turn off the confirmation.  Voilà, one touch dialing! All I had to do was edit the contact and place a star by the contact info that I wanted to speed dial, email, message, etc.

All in all this is a beautiful and useful app once you get it set up. Each of your contact pages can have its own background color. Contact info is in a big enough font for quick glances, which comes in handy while driving [ed. note:  You're not dialing while driving are you?]. Most importantly, the app never lags and is always speedy. Once you get used to using this app it’s a real pleasure and I find myself frequenting this app more often than the normal Palm contacts app. Thank you Communicate Speed Dial for saving me from being forced to wade through my endless contacts to call someone important.

There are a couple of downsides with this app though. I would like to be able to set more than one “speed dial” to a contact. For example, I want one touch email and calling for my wife. I know it sounds petty but I don’t want to have to tap multiple times for the rest of contact info that is not starred. Also, this app had a couple of its own gestures that are explained in the help menu but it would benefit from a quick tutorial. Maybe if it showed you how to use the app before you started it would feel more natural from the beginning. This is a solid developer though and I have faith that there will be great things in the near future of this app.

[Click here to read more about Communicate Speed Dial and to download it to your webOS device]