WorldCard Contacts for iPhone: Misstep or First Step?

by Craik Pyke on 26/03/10 at 9:31 am

Craik Pyke is telecommunications architect and software developer specializing in mobile applications and an editor for iPhoneCTO.

I want to like WorldCard Contacts, I really do… I waxed philosophic about a month ago on my desire for a single unified address book. My disappointment stemmed from the fact that WorldCard Mobile wasn’t able to properly merge business cards put through it’s OCR engine with my address book in such a manner as to preserve the card photo. Therefore, it was with some excitement that I took the opportunity to look at WorldCard Contacts

when other iPhoneCTO editors pointed the application out.

My expectations may have been too high leading into this review. I was hoping that WorldCard Contacts would provide an overlay to the iPhone native Contacts application which would capture the picture of business cards and store them against the contact they correspond to while maintaining the native applications ability to synchronize with the Address Book on my Mac and MobileMe.

With that in mind, I installed and started WorldCard Contacts. It immediately pulled the contact from the iPhone native application into its own view. It was immediately apparent that WorldCard Contacts also strives to provide an integrated Dialer mimicking the iPhone’s keypad “Recent” and “Favorites” capabilities. Unfortunately, while the contacts were imported, nothing else was properly categorized.

I then attempted to create a new contact based on a business card. I used the option to create a contact using the camera and I took a picture of the business card. The integration at this point with WorldCard Mobile was quite flawless; the Mobile application started, performed the OCR required against the business card, processed and then returned the WorldCard Contacts application to the foreground. I had a new contact in the Cards section of the WorldCard Contacts application and I was pleased that the photo of the business card was indeed stored against the contact. I did note that the new contact wasn’t in the iPhone native “Contacts” application, and therefore wasn’t synchronized to MobileMe, OS X Address Book, or my Exchange contacts (the latter pulling its data from the Address Book via Entourage’s sync services integration).

I re-entered the WorldCard Contacts application and found an option to “move” the contact into the native Contacts section. The option did just that, but in the process eliminated the data from the WorldCard Contact data store and deleted the photo of the business card. There is a means to “copy” the data, but the photo of the business card is still not migrated to the native Contacts application – which was the most significant item I was expecting.

So after all this, I’m left wondering why isn’t WorldCard Contacts simply part of WorldCard Mobile? If the goal was to provide a “hub” application which several WorldCard applications would drive data into, then the “hub” has to provide equivalent functionality to what it’s replacing; the native Contacts application. If it isn’t intended as a replacement to the native application, then it’s really functionality I would have expected in the next major revision of the WorldCard Mobile application.

Perhaps there’s a roadmap in all of this that is yet to reveal itself. But as it stands, I’m left feeling that I’ve purchased two halves of one applications that are both version 1.0 quality. Waiting for the 2.0 release to either complete the proper linkage between them, or to graft them together they way the should have been.