mlapida

Last week I downloaded the iPhone application Photo PhoneBook and have been testing it out. For starters my setup for my phone is pretty simple, I use Google Sync to sync my contacts and also my calendar. That uses the exchange technology built into the phone and only allows for a specific size picture, which may have dampered my opinion of the app.

PPB allows you to log into your facebook account, it will look at your contacts and compare them to your facebook friends list. After that the app will download the profile pictures of the people you select. There have been a few of these apps out there, but this was the first free one I found. For the most part the app correctly identified my contacts as well as their profile pictures, but when I went to set them as photo contacts, it incorrectly resized them, squishing the images in the small square box allocated for exchange photo contacts. Also, when I tried to manually edit the cropped area of the photo, the image was deformed and could not be fixed.

Also something I found a little odd. When you first log in, you are forced to attach a picture of yourself to your account. This is not your facebook photo, but rather must be a photo you have stored locally on the phone. If a friend uses the software, and it finds your account, it will choose this picture instead of your facebook picture. In my case, this is not something I wanted, nor another service I wanted to constantly be updating my picture on. Luckily I don’t know anyone that uses it.

Overall PPB has a great idea, but in the end I believe users need more control over the image for each user when importing, and not just assume that every user has an image that will fit perfectly.

Rating – 3/5

[PPB iTunes]