A few weeks back at Research In Motion’s (RIM) Wireless Enterprise Symposium (WES), I got a full demonstration of Technicopia’s then unreleased Gwabbit for BlackBerry application, which pulls contact information including names, addresses and phone numbers, from mail you receive on your BlackBerry device into your smartphone’s address book. I was so impressed with the application that I named it one of ten notable products in my Best of WES 2009, and today it’s publicly available for $9.99 a year.
Gwabbit for Microsoft Outlook, which is meant for use on desktop or laptop computers and costs $19.99 for unlimited use, has been around for some time, but Technicopia just announced the availability of the BlackBerry version on RIM’s BlackBerry App World and at Gwabbit.com. However, the app’s still not available on the company’s site, only on App World.
Gwabbit for BlackBerry works on any and all RIM devices, according to Technicopia. And the company plans to release “secure gwabbit products” for BlackBerry enterprise users in late 2009, says Todd Miller, Technicopia founder and president.
I just bought Gwabbit from App World, and so far my experience has been mostly a positive one. You can set Gwabbit to automatically ask if you want to add new contacts that aren’t already in your BlackBerry address book or you can launch the program manually whenever you wish to add a new contact from an e-mail message via your BlackBerry Menu key.
The manual option works well, but I had some issues with the auto option. Specifically, I opened a few messages from senders not in my address book, who used e-mail signatures, and I never got an auto prompt. I did see the prompt for some new contacts, but not all the ones I’d want. Gwabbit also occasionally assigned incorrect information to a few fields within new contacts I added. For example, one of the message senders included an e-mail and international mailing address within their signature, but no phone number. Gwabbit took some of the numbers from the mailing address postal code and dropped them into the phone number field.
Clearly, the BlackBerry app’s not perfect, but it is the company’s first release, and it has the potential to be truly valuable to folks who use their BlackBerry devices, or Outlook, as their main address books.
Visit App World on your BlackBerry device to download a free trial of Gwabbit. You’ll be gwad you did, I bet.
AS
