Back in the day, we used the SIM card to store/restore contacts. Some of my friends even rely on the carrier (Verizon, AT&T) to manage their contacts (backup, restore,..). In this cloud era, one would expect iCloud or Google to do the contact management. Not everyone are excited about cloud though. There comes a time when you want to manage your contacts yourself and not on cloud but your own machine, locally. Enter CopyTrans Contacts.

CopyTrans Contacts has a nice UI (for Windows machines) and it shows all the contacts from your iPhone (cloud or not) on your computer. This provides you complete control of all your address book entries on your iPhone. If you ever tried managing your contacts on your iPhone, you would know how much of a pain it is to get the job done. Say, you wanted to add info to a contact or even delete a contact or de-dupe a contact – all the above are time consuming on your iPhone and iPad even with the latest iOS release iOS 6.

Following is what I did with CopyTrans contacts. I am really happy with the amount of time it saved consolidating some dupe contacts and deleting unwanted contacts :

• If you are OK with FaceBook storing a copy of your contacts on their servers, this is a. I first allowed FaceBook to sync contacts on the iPhone (Open FaceBook app on your iPhone and tap on ‘Friends’ in the left pane and tap on the top right arrow). This got me new contacts from FaceBook that I don’t have numbers for. I also got pictures associated to the contacts in my address book. Pretty nifty if you ask me.

• I also have contacts from MobileMe (iCloud) and Gmail on the iPhone.
• Now that I have all the contacts on the iPhone, I downloaded CopyTrans Contacts. (Make sure you have iTunes installed on your machine before you install CopyTrans Contacts)
• Launch CopyTrans Contacts on your Windows machine and then connect the iPhone to your computer.
• You will see all the contacts from your iPhone on your computer. Select all the contacts from CopyTrans Contacts app on your computer as shown and save them to your computer (‘Export selected’ shown at top left).

• Now you will have a whole bunch of vcf files on your computer. I tackled with duplicate contacts by identifying contacts where they have a (1) or (2) or … depending on how many copies of the same contacts exist. So, I started deleting all the duplicate contacts by holding the control key and selecting those contacts with (1) or (2) or (3). You could also search for ‘(1)’ or ‘(2)’ in Windows Explorer to quickly delete duplicates.
• I have personally identified few hundred duplicate contacts given that these contacts are from both iCloud, Gmail and FaceBook. My aim was to view all unique contacts at one place on my iPhone.
• Add a ‘group’  by clicking the ‘+’ icon in CopyTrans Contacts. I named it ‘Unique Contacts’ and I then dragged the cleaned contacts from the previous steps to this group. I now have distinct contacts in a group. This is just a group and you still have the contacts in Gmail and iCloud intact on the iPhone.

• Mission accomplished! You can also edit contacts pretty quickly using CopyTrans Contacts and save the changes on your iPhone.

Pricing and Giveaway :

CopyTrans Contacts is priced at $9.99 while it is available for only $1.99 for a limited time till October 7th, 2012. A very good deal if you ask me! There are also few licenses up for grabs, all you have to do is comment about how you will be using CopyTrans Contacts. Hurry, offer ends soon!