Brewster (for iPhone)

How do you stay connected with people you know? A batch of your contacts might be listed in your email address book, while another set might be former colleagues only connected to you via LinkedIn, while still others might be Facebook friends. Good luck finding phone numbers and email addresses of the people you need when you need them! That's why we have contact management services and apps like Brewster for iPhone (free).

Brewster hooks into multiple places where you might have contact information stored and brings them together, merging duplicates along the way. Visually appealing with good sized photos of your friends leading the charge, the Brewster iPhone app eases the pain of looking for contact information. It also auto-generates some neat lists, such as people in a certain geographic region and people with whom you may be losing touch. The merging feature works very well, with a manual override option available. Across all my contacts, I only found one duplicate left over after Brewster culled through all the people in my various address books.

A similar app called Smartr Contacts does largely the same job, but also gives you rich information about your history of interactions with a person, although it's driven more by search and less by exploration. Brewster, on the other hand, puts faces to names in an interface you can explore, rather than strictly search. That design choice may lead you to waste time (I got sucked into looking for pictures of people I didn't recognize), or it may aid your memory if you're someone who remembers people by their faces rather than company affiliation, location, or name.

Set Up and Requirements
To use the free app, you do have to give it access to two places where contacts are stored: your iPhone's Contacts app, and either Facebook or Twitter. If you don't use one of those social networks or simply do not want contacts from there mixed into this contact manager, then Brewster isn't an app you'll want to use. I can also see how some business professionals would not want to import their Facebook or Twitter contacts, as those sites could contain thousands of people who are ostensibly strangers. Brewster could have a much bigger following if it allowed users to bypass the social network integration requirement.

Beyond Facebook, Twitter, and the Contacts app, you can connect Brewster to Gmail (multiple accounts), LinkedIn, and Foursquare. You can integrate with multiple Gmail accounts, but only one account on the other services. It doesn't directly support Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Microsoft Exchange accounts, or other email services, but it indirectly covers those because it connects to your iPhone's Contact list (where all those services are supported).

The app takes a few minutes to grab all the information it needs from those services and collate it, but once it does, it displays pictures of your friends in a grid.

Features
You can get to this grid to explore all the people in your various address books by tapping the "people" menu icon on the lower left corner of the screen. This ability to explore markedly differs from Smartr Contacts, which doesn't show you anything about your contacts until you key terms into a search bar. Brewster prompts you to select your favorite contacts, who are then whisked into a designated favorites area that takes over the top of the "people" page.

An "updates" section shows much larger pictures of people who are relevant for some time-sensitive reason: It's their birthday, they're a recently added contact, or they're trending on one your social networks, for example.

Unlike Smartr Contacts, Brewster's search page shows much more than just a search bar, suggesting searches that might be relevant based on information tied to your contacts. My search page, for example, suggests I might be interested in "NYC" (there's a note below that entry that reads, "current city"), "journalism," "online media," and a few other job-related words. You can also type into the search bar any terms you choose, and Brewster will look for it across all your contacts' information. I typed "Wisconsin" and found people who have worked, lived, and studied in that state.

The tab for "lists" shows some of Brewster's most interesting capabilities. You can make your own lists, such as family members or healthcare providers, but Brewster will automatically generate a number of lists for you, tagged with a number indicating how many people are on that list. The ones I found in my account sorted the people I know into groups based on their university affiliations, current and past employers, and even job functions. As it happens, I have more than 30 connections who are fellow writers or editors. Who knew?

When you tap a person's image, a new page opens showing all kinds of information: email addresses, phone numbers, social networking accounts, interests listed on social networks, employment history, mutual connections, and more. You can email, call, or text the person with one touch from the Brewster app. If the contact appears in multiple places and has multiple profile pictures, they all appear in a swipe-able slideshow display at the top of the page.

The only information that isn't included but that you can find in Smartr Contacts is your history of interaction with the person.

Brewster merged almost every one of the duplicate entries among my contacts. I only found one person who was listed twice. If Brewster merges two or more accounts that you want to keep separate, you can unmerge them manually by tapping an edit (pen icon) button on that contact's information page. From that same panel, you can delete a contact, too, which I found useful for cleaning up solicitors.

3, 2, 1, Contact!
The Brewster iPhone app puts contact information at your fingertips, even if it's spread out across a variety of internet services, email accounts, and your phone's address book. Its visual display of faces breathes life into contact management, and its auto-generated lists make finding the people you need even easier. Anyone staunchly opposed to joining Facebook or Twitter won't be able to use the app, I'm afraid, which seems like an unnecessary restriction. It also doesn't show you your interaction history with contacts?use Smartr Contacts if you want that feature. Brewster is a great time-saving app for busy and well-connected people.

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