Groups: Drag & Drop Contacts Management makes sorting your contacts into groups as easy as poking a finger into a warm apple pie. This app, from Guided Ways Technologies, does exactly what its name implies.
Launch the app and it sucks up all the names in alphabetical order from your Contacts list. Along the right side of the screen is a scrolling menu of colour-coded “Smart Group” tabs.
When you first launch Groups: Drag & Drop Contacts Management, you’ll see Smart Group tabs for contacts that lack names, phone numbers, images or email addresses. Tap any of those tabs to see a list of contacts that fit in each of those categories. From the get-go, you can see what contacts you might want to update with missing information.
Drag & Drop Contacts has additional Smart Group tabs for All, Singles and Trash. The Single tab displays contact names that do not belong to any other group. Contacts dragged into the Trash group are deleted when you sync with iTunes on your desktop, but you can still retrieve them if you decide Jane and Jack weren’t such bad people after all.
You can enable/disable any of the preset tabs by tapping the Info button in the upper right corner of the screen. On the same screen, you can also choose to sort your contacts by first or last name and learn how to use the app by tapping the Help button.
To add a Smart Group tab, tap the Add Group button in the upper left corner and enter a group name. Once that’s done, all you have to do is drag and drop each contact onto the appropriate group tab.
Put a finger on a contact name, wait for a second for it to light up, and then drag. The first time you drag and drop a name into each category, you’ll see a green square with a checkmark. Drag the same name into the same group a second time, and you’ll see a red square indicating that it’s a duplicate (you won’t have duplicate names in the same category, however).
Groups: Drag & Drop Contacts Management puts a colour-coded icon with a number in it next to each name in a group indicating that that contact belongs to one, two or more groups. Tap the icon and you’ll get a pop-out box listing the groups the contact belongs to along with the option to delete the contact from any of the listed groups.
Once you’ve created a group, holding the Smart Group tab pops up a screen with options to email the group, rename or delete the group, and remove all the members of the group. You cannot modify the app’s original, preset Smart Groups, however.
For $2.99, Groups: Drag & Drop Contacts Management is a pretty good deal. I’ve seen a couple of other apps that did similar things but not as easily and for a couple of bucks more.