Gwabbit (BlackBerry)

CNET Editors' review

by: Jessica Dolcourt on May 29, 2009

The last thing you need if you're a busy professional on the go is to waste your time typing the names of your new contacts into your BlackBerry address book. Especially when software can do it for you. Gwabbit's BlackBerry application helps business professionals get the names, numbers, and e-mail addresses from a contact's e-mail into their address book without all the tedious typing.

Gwabbit works its trade by automatically searching the signature block at the end of an e-mail and comparing that to your address book entries. If there are discrepancies or omissions between the two, Gwabbit will launch and ask if you'd like to create a new address book entry or overwrite an existing one. Declining will keep Gwabbit from asking again and again. While the BlackBerry has its own mechanism for adding e-mail contacts to the address book, Gwabbit's application does so automatically and rapidly, porting over far more information in the process. Gwabbit, for example, detects e-mail address, phone numbers, company name, and contact's title versus BlackBerry's native inclusion of just the e-mail address.

There is an important caveat, however. Gwabbit is spurred into action by the presence of a phone number in the signature block of an e-mail message. This is a specific order, and one that underscores the app's target audience of business professionals reading and responding to their corporate e-mail. You can also manually select Gwabbit from the BlackBerry context menu if it misses a beat.

While most casual users probably won't receive enough personal e-mail girded with phone numbers in a signature block, Gwabbit is an ideal productivity score for those who regularly use their phone as a mobile computer during business hours. As a reminder, Gwabbit for BlackBerry is compatible with BlackBerry phones running version 4.2 of the operating system or higher, costs $9.95 for a yearlong subscription, and offers a 14-day and 20-use trial.