Plaxo Releases iApp

A long-time player in the social/business connection scene, Plaxo has finally come around and released their very own iApp.

For those who may not be aware, Plaxo is a digital address book, contact manager, calendar, and overall social network that serves similar functions, but is more of a personalized LinkedIN.

You can collaborate with personal and professional colleagues, search for and find people you have associations with, create calendar events, and of course, update your current status to reflect your latest activities.

I love their new tagline: “Contact in the Cloud.” Here’s a screenshot of my slightly out-dated Plaxo main-page:

All that being said, the new iApp released just yesterday has some key features that make this app pretty interesting and worthy of a look:

• FREE full two-way sync between Plaxo and iPhone or iPod Touch (no Premium membership required) — this alone is huge
• Single sign-on to Plaxo, Google, or Facebook
• Call or email contacts directly from the app
• iOS4 enabled — meaning fast application switching is in place

I’ve been an off-and-on user of the Plaxo service for about 3 years now. The web-based service has gotten dramatically better and more user-friendly over time (which obviously is good). The iApp looks to be quite intuitive and straight-forward to navigate. For a 1.0 release, I’m surprisingly pleased.

If you don’t already have a Plaxo account, no worries, you can actually sign up for one directly through the iApp. I’ve got the free/basic account and that has served me well for the past 3 years. If you need cloud backup with de-duplication, Google, Windows Mobile and advanced Outlook syncing capabilities, you’ll need to upgrade to their Premium offering.

Point of reference: I ran into a bit of a snag when first trying to run the Plaxo iApp on my iPhone 4. Reason being, I sync Microsoft Exchange data to my iPhone. At present that is not supported by the Plaxo Address Book Sync and when you fire up the app, it presents you with the following notice:

The Plaxo iApp is available for FREE in the App Store.