Fix It – Fix Labels & Find Duplicates
Michael (Admin) | Aug 11, 2009 Utilities
(5 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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If you’re as lazy and disorganized as I am you’ve probably got duplicates all over the place in your iPhone contacts. Fix It’s job is to make it easy to remove the duplicates and it also lets you rearrange a few labels within your contacts which I don’t really see a need for but the feature’s there so yay, I guess.
As far as cleaning up the contacts goes, Fix It does make it pretty easy in most respects. It will find contacts that are duplicated and group them together so that you can choose which ones to get rid of or, if it’s one of those mysterious names that makes you go “who the hell is that??”, you can delete the contact and all duplicates with just two quick taps.
The thing about Fix It that kind of vexes me is that it wouldn’t remove some of my duplicates for whatever reason. After zapping all the dupes it gave me a “thumbs up” screen that said I’d gotten all of them. I exited the app, then started it again, and suddenly some of the duplicates came back from the dead! I deleted them again. Exit. Restart. Once again they’re back.
I guess it’s a bug that WildFone needs to work out… for me, there were only five un-killable duplicates that kept on resurrecting themselves (deleting manually in Contacts did the trick), but I only have about 300 contacts, half of which are liquor stores and burrito joints. If you’re one of the popular kids and have thousands of contacts, this bug could be much more of an annoyance.
Something to keep in mind as you’re going around trashing stuff from your contact list is that you can un-delete things from the trash and, in a major emergency, you can un-delete everything if there’s a contact you really wish you hadn’t kicked to the curb. I haven’t tried the full restore because I really don’t feel like going through my duplicates again, but the option is there if you need it. When you’re looking at the duplicates screen, just shake your iPhone to get the warning message for restoring everything to its original state. This is a nice feature that almost makes you want to use Fix It for all contact deletions, just in case.
The label-fixer allows you to switch only three labels: First, Last, and Company. In case you accidentally screwed up and put in Bob Vance as Vance Bob, you’re an idiot but that mistake is easily fixable with this part of the app. Hopefully you at least put Vance Refrigeration in the Company field instead of first or last name.
I can see how fixing labels might be useful, but having only three fields to fix makes this feature pretty limited. I think it’s a lot more likely that I’d mix up someone’s work and cell phone, or work address vs. personal address, but those fields aren’t included here.
Overall I like how Fix It goes about presenting duplicate contacts because it gives me the opportunity to look at them before deciding which one to delete, but the mysterious un-deletable contact bug and the limited label fuctionality are both areas that I hope get addressed in a future update. If your contacts are completely messed up and you’re just too scared to take on the daunting task of doing the cleanup manually, Fix It is a pretty good hand-holding app that will make the job seem a little less painful.
iTunes Link – Fix It
Version 1.0
Reviewed on iPhone 3G OS3.0
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- It takes a few seconds to load your contacts, depending on how many you have
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- Hit the red (x) to delete or (i) to see the contact info
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- This guy hates my guts! Haha. So why is he in my Contacts??
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- No duplicates found... until you restart the app!
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- I already deleted Mom but she just won't go away
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- You can un-delete junk in the trash
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- Need a lot more fields here for this to be useful!
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- Fix It for Dummies
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- Careful now, you're about to restore ALL the stuff you've deleted since you installed Fix It!
(4.80 out of 5)