Art of the iPhone

Groups 2 ($4.99, iTunes link) is an app from Guided Ways Technologies that lets you to create, edit, and delete groups of iPhone contacts, something you can’t do with the iPhone’s default Contacts app. You can then use these groups in useful ways such as sending emails or SMS text messages to those groups, or organizing your contacts by upcoming birthdays. Want to email your entire family about your upcoming vacation with a single tap? Groups is an app for that.

I found Groups 2 a pleasure to use. The app has a beautiful, intuitive interface that Apple should take note of for their own Contacts app. Perhaps the best example of the app’s slick design comes when adding a contact to a group. You hold down your finger on a contact for a heartbeat or two to make a Rolodex card icon appear. You then drag and drop the card into any group to add it. It’s a quick and simple way to organize your contacts.

The groups you create with the app are added to the iPhone’s default Contacts/Phone apps, which in turn means they’ll sync and backup to iTunes, Address Book (for Macs), and Outlook (for PCs). You can color-code each group’s label to make them stand out from each other and add a colorful look to the app.

Groups also comes with a smart dialer (the developer calls the technology Callway). The smart dialer searches through you contacts as you punch in the digits (or the corresponding letters, depending on what your goal is). Once you narrow down the list to find your desired contact, you tap the contact to dial.

Groups also has a feature called smart groups that works a lot like iTunes’ smart playlists. With smart groups, you can automatically create groups using parameters like area codes or whether or not the contact has an email associated with it. For example, you can create a smart group that will tell you what contacts have birthdays coming up in the next 30 days. Every time you open that list, it repopulates with the nearest birthday showing first. Pretty cool.

There aren’t many downsides to the app other than it’s a bit of overkill for the purpose of creating groups of contacts. But on the other hand, the app is so well designed, it could replace the iPhone’s default Phone app for making everyday calls. It offers everything the iPhone’s Contacts app does, including the ability to create new iPhone contacts.

Conclusion

Groups 2’s ($4.99, iTunes link) quick, slick, and powerful interface makes it an excellent solution for creating groups of contacts on your iPhone and could even serve as a replacement for the iPhone’s default Contacts/Phone apps. The most obvious use of Groups is as a solution for mass emails, but it’s also a good way to organize and clean up your contacts using features like smart groups. Overall, we found the robustness of the app’s feature set to be impressive, and we highly recommend the app.