Contacts plus for Android

Contacts plus offers great social media support and loads of features, but makes some head-scratching design choices. It makes too many decisions for you and it flings some downright annoying pop-up notifications to your phone. However, if you have the patience to tweak it, you might find some things you really love about the app.

Contacts plus combines your phone's contact list with your contacts from social media. It supports the usual suspects like Facebook and Twitter, but LinkedIn, Google+, and even Foursquare come along for the ride, too. It's easy to see how you're connected with any given contact, as well. The app smashes together a dialer and a texting inbox for easy access to connect with your friends. The app goes a little overboard with notifications, offering birthday notifications and messaging pop-ups turned on by default, but you can turn these off if you want. The app also lets you set up a picture-based speed dialer on your home screen. It supports as many as 16 different contacts, and you can make your own with 1x1 contact widgets. Sadly, you can only call or load the contact's profile from these widgets. You can't text the person or see any contact history from them. That's a bit of a downside if you text your friends more often than you call them. However, Contacts plus' other marquee features make up for some of its shortcomings.

If you don't mind very active notifications and an app that makes choices for you, then this is a good app to try. Contacts plus is worth downloading for the photo speed dial alone.