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Remember the PalmPilot? Remember how it synced all your contacts to either Palm Desktop or Outlook? That was pretty nice.
If you’re a Windows user, there’s no such desktop option for managing your iPhone address book. Sure, it gets backed up when you sync with iTunes, but there’s no way to view or edit all those contacts. Your only real option is to switch to syncing with iCloud, which affords limited browser-based contact management.
Thankfully, there’s another option: CopyTrans Contacts. This simple Windows utility lets you organize, edit, back up, and export your iPhone address book.
It works like this: Connect your iPhone to your PC, let iTunes do its sync/backup thing, then shut down iTunes and launch CopyTrans Contacts. (FYI, the program is portable, meaning there’s nothing to install — you can run it from a flash drive for on-the-run address-book management.)
In seconds you’ll see your entire address book. You can click a contact to view or edit it, add a new contact, and so on. The program also lets you create and manage groups.
CopyTrans performs backup and migration duties as well. You can back up one or more contacts to your PC (each as an individual .vcf file), or export them to any number of destinations: Android, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Thunderbird, and so on. That makes this an especially handy utility for anyone looking to migrate from iOS to another platform.
Likewise, CopyTrans can import contacts in any standard format: comma-separated, Excel, Windows, and .vcf. You can even drag and drop them to the CopyTrans window, just to save a few steps.
It’s a decidedly handy little tool, one I especially like for doing the kind of contact editing/organizing I can’t easily do on my iPhone. One thing it lacks, however, is any kind of duplicate remover. Plus, it doesn’t let you edit contacts stored in iCloud, which is kind of a hassle.
CopyTrans Contacts will sell for $9.99 starting this Sunday. But you can grab it now for $1.99. For 2 bucks, I wouldn’t hesitate to snatch this up. For 10 bucks, I’d consider it money well spent for a simple, solid address-book manager.
