If you’re tired of the Phone app’s list view, PhoneFace might be for you. PhoneFace is named as such because you can see people’s faces (or whatever picture you choose for them) when you call them. This isn’t about lists — it’s a little bit of cover flow for contacts. Hit the jump for the quick review.
Setup
The app is simple and light — so much so that it might well be a decent replacement for the Phone app on the dock if you call only a few people on a regular basis. Instead of showing you a set of lists divided into tabs, PhoneFace shows only the contacts that you want to see. Simply press the add button on the top-right of the screen, pick a contact, and you’re done.
If the contact lacks a picture, you can choose from pre-set avatars, add or take a picture, send an e-mail asking for a picture (oh, how quaint!), or download the current picture from Twitter (login required). I find it a little strange that the developers chose Twitter and not Facebook, though.
Once you tap on a contact, you can choose to email, call, or text the person as long as the details are there. Unlike the Phone app, tapping on the ‘call’ button brings up a prompt to check whether you really want to call. Another difference is the extra tap that it takes to reach any contact details. Tapping on the ‘i’ button in the lower right corner takes you to a contact option screen, and from there it takes one more tap to see the contact detail screen that you’d see in the default Phone app. This might be a limitation of the SDK, but it limits PhoneFace to being just a visual dialer, and not an alternative address book.
Just a little too simple
I’m all for making simple apps that just do the job well, but I think PhoneFace doesn’t offer enough flexibility in its views. Unlike the iPod app’s CoverFlow in landscape, PhoneFace doesn’t preserve any momentum in its scrolling. This means that you have to tap to move from one contact to the other, so if you have more than a couple of contacts, it can get a little tedious. It’s not the end of the world, but it does show the merits of Apple’s list view, since you can easily see and dial up to eight contacts within the Phone App, as opposed to just one with PhoneFace.
Conclusion
I like the idea behind PhoneFace, as I think the Phone app could certainly use a little more ‘oomph’ (or at least a decent App Store alternative), but I don’t think it delivers quite enough. It excludes contact details that aren’t email addresses or phone numbers, and it doesn’t handle multiple contacts very well in its current CoverFlow-esque iteration. It’s a decent purchase for $0.99, but I think there’s a lot of room for improvement here.
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If you’re interested in checking PhoneFace out for yourself, the app is available for $0.99 on the App Store link here.
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