This post reviews QuickContacts, a jailbreak tweak that adds your favorite to Spotlight on your iPhone or iPod Touch.
Wouldn’t it be handy if you could quickly access your most frequently used contacts directly from your iPhone or iPod Touch’s home screen? QuickContacts is a jailbreak tweak that lets you do just that.
With iOS 7, Apple changed the way you access Spotlight search. Instead of swiping over to access a page located to the left of your home screen, pulling down on the app icons and iOS will immediately launch a Spotlight search. QuickContacts replaces the Spotlight interface with a row of handy bubbles to which you can assign your favorite contacts. Simply tap and hold on a bubble and QuickContacts will bring up your contact list. Selecting a contact from the list will add them to that bubble. You can even add four more contacts to a second page of QuickContacts that you can access by swiping on QuickContacts from right to left.
After you’ve added the contacts you wish to use, a simple tap on their bubble will bring up a box with their photo, their name, and three contact method buttons: phone, message, and email.
Tapping the phone button will initiate a phone call to the contact, tapping the message button will create a new iMessage or text message to the contact, and tapping the email button will create a new email to that contact. Using QuickContacts means that you won’t have to open the Phone, Messages, or Email app to communicate with your most frequently accessed contacts. It’s as easy as that!
But what if you still want to be able to access Spotlight search? You can do so by dragging down to reveal QuickContacts and then swiping from left to right. Spotlight will launch just like normal.
Conclusion – QuickContacts is a simple, attractive, and unique way to access your most used contacts from the home screen of your iPhone or iPod Touch. I really like the way this tweak looks. It is designed well and doesn’t feel out of place in iOS. It works every time and does what it’s intended to do. I found, though, after a week or so of using QuickContacts that it just didn’t quite fit with how I interact with my contacts on my iPhone. I still found myself opening up the Phone, Messages, and Mailbox (the third party email app I use) to access my contacts. Part of this was due to the fact that QuickContacts, while consolidating things into a simple interface, still requires almost the same amount of taps and time to make a phone call or send a message. However, if QuickContacts looks like something you would use, I really encourage you to check it out. Having the ability to quickly access the contacts you get in touch with most directly from your iPhone or iPod Touch’s home screen can be really useful.
QuickContacts is available on Cydia for $1.99. Find it using the Search tab. Your device will need to be jailbroken in order to install QuickContacts. For more information on jailbreaking, please see our series on the subject starting here. To find out how to jailbreak iOS 7, click here.
