Countless phone dialer and contacts replacement apps have come and
gone since Android first came to light. Though there haven’t been many
apps to break away from the fairly standard features in this regard to
produce something innovative – something that is more than just eye
candy. Enter Thread - the app that gives you more
control and information about your contact during an incoming call. It
consolidates all your communication with your contacts in Messages,
Gmail, Facebook and Twitter, and neatly brings up the latest feed from
each medium when receiving a call. Read on after the break for more on
this one-of-a-kind app.
Thread is presently in beta, but works quite well. When you first
launch the app, you’ll be offered to sync your Gmail account with
Thread, which you can skip. As mentioned earlier, the app functions with
streams from Gmail, Facebook and Twitter, whereas Text Messages are
locally managed. To add these accounts to Thread at any time, simply hit
the Menu button and tap ‘Accounts’. The app seems to be having issues
with syncing Facebook right now but being a beta release, it should be
sorted out in a more stable version. If you want to disable a stream,
you can ‘Sign out’, and if you wish to completely remove an account, tap
and hold the account for a second and you will see the remove button.
The app’s dialer and contacts list work as you would expect, offering
you an alternative to the stock Dialer, Contacts and Call Log. The
contacts list can use a sorting function, in order to quickly access
your desired contacts without having to scroll a lot.
All information about your contacts and your communication with them, is sorted into tabs at the top ribbon (which you can swipe to scroll), where you can quickly see what your friends have been up to lately, complete with your last communication with them. The developers should considers adding the swipe feature to the pages itself for a more fluid experience.
To make your experience even more rich, the feeds have been made
interactive so you can reply to activity, re-tweet and do much more from
the interface itself, rather than merely being able to read and scroll
through them.
Once your accounts and contacts are synced, the result should be
similar to the screenshot above when you receive a call. You can easily
scroll through the feeds for a better context to a conversation before a
call. To attend or reject the call, simply swipe the call button to the
right or left. Do note that the feeds screen will only show up for a
short while; a shrinking blue horizontal bar acts as countdown for the
feeds display and once it runs out completely, the native Android call
interface takes over.
Pros
All information about your contacts and your communication with them, is sorted into tabs at the top ribbon (which you can swipe to scroll), where you can quickly see what your friends have been up to lately, complete with your last communication with them. The developers should considers adding the swipe feature to the pages itself for a more fluid experience.
Pros
- Account Syncing with Gmail, Facebook & Twitter
- Interactive feeds
- Intuitive UI
- No swipe gestures for feed pages
- No contacts sorting
- Can freeze at times