Although we are obviously very much pro-Nokia here at NokNok, that doesn't mean that we don't sometimes see features on non-Nokia phones that make us go "Ooh". One such is the social networking integration on the Motorola Dext, which links your contacts to your various social sites in a fairly seamless manner. Wouldn't it be nice to have something similar on our phone OS of choice? Now you can with Socially Mobile - see if it hits the right spot with our hands-on review...
Socially Mobile is a pretty good attempt at doing just that. The app can work as a (rather simple) client for checking updates to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook but its real focus in in linking your friends on those sites with the contacts in your phone's addressbook.
On starting up the app you need to choose your preferred access method (e.g. a wifi point or 3G, etc) and provide login details to your social networks. We wouldn't recommend using the app as your main way of checking or updating Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, especially when there are much better apps around for at least two of them. STill, it is reasonably serviceable and not too bad as a one-stop-shop. You can set Socially Mobile to auto-refresh the status messages of all the people you follow and have the choice of turning this off if you are away from your access point of choice, which is a nice touch.
Associating contacts with their Social Network avatars is done in one of two ways. Either trawl through the list within Socially Mobile and choose the 'link to contact' button or wait for them to call you and make the link once you hang up. This, unfortunately, is where our major problem lay. Despite several attempts, we just couldn't get Socially Mobile to grab all of our followers from Twitter. It may have been a lack of capital letters in their names, or just the sheer number that we were trying to use but some contacts were seemingly invisible to the app - rather crucially one of the ones we needed to associate with a much used contact.
Assuming you do manage to associate a contact with a social networking buddy, the app really comes into its own. Whenever you get a call from a linked contact you will get a colourful set of popup windows displaying their avatar pic, the last time they called or texted and a scrolling box of their most recent status updates. It is a really handy way of both seeing who is calling and what they are currently up to. At least, it would be if it worked for everyone. Hey ho.
There is a little more to the app than first meets the eye. Every incoming call that you answer is noted by Socially Mobile and the app can act as a filter by blocking any numbers you don't want to speak to. It is a barely mentioned extra feature, but one we have seen apps charge hard cash for. Our only complaint here is that you might end up doing it accidentally on a touchscreen, so it is worth checking the call blacklist every now and again to see if there have been any mistakes.
All in all, this is an app with a few problems, but assuming the bugs can be ironed out (and we are prepared to accept the problem might be at our end) it is one with real potential.
Details:
Price: Free
Size: 0.5 MB
Check out our Socially Mobile Review image gallery:
