Recommend me a good contact manager for phone numbers and names?

November 14, 2007 4:41 PM

I'm looking for a "lite" contact manager for my PC?

I am tired of losing scraps of paper with temporary phone numbers on them...I do not want to enter them into my Outlook contacts manager. Is there any no "bells and whistles" application out there that I can quickly tap in the details into my PC? Even better would be an application that syncs with a Palm device?

posted by jacobean to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

I would suggest using the contacts feature of gmail. It's pretty simple, and your contacts would be available in any place you had internet access.
posted by mpls2 at 4:56 PM on November 14, 2007

Seconding GMail.

Perhaps you might want to try Plaxo. I don't think they spam people in your contacts list anymore.
posted by reenum at 4:58 PM on November 14, 2007

This might be an obvious question, but have you looked at Palm Desktop? It's a free download.
posted by bottlebrushtree at 5:24 PM on November 14, 2007

The thing that syncs well with the Palm is the Palm Desktop, which you can get for free if you have a Palm. It's relatively light compared to Outlook, though I suppose heavy compared to, hmm, Notepad.

There are ways of getting, say, GMail Contacts to sync with the Palm, but I think it involves additional software talking to Palm Desktop, and is a bit of a pain. You probably would be required to use Palm Desktop, anyway.
posted by chengjih at 6:20 PM on November 14, 2007

I use palm desktop although i do not have a palm. its a very simple contact manager that does what i need without too many bells+whistles. ALso it can export to a format that gmail can import. So, there's that.

Also, it's free.
posted by softlord at 7:07 PM on November 14, 2007

Windows XP comes with a simple contact manager called Address Book; it's under Accessories. It's surprisingly useful.
posted by Nelson at 7:23 PM on November 14, 2007

Seconding the Palm Desktop. If you have a Palm, this is exactly what you should be doing. Sync it once a week, or whenever you make updates, and life is grand. The main things I use on the Palm Desktop side of things are contacts, like you want to do, and it's also great for dumping a bunch of text into the note fields on the Palm to store just random useful information (shopping lists, directions to places, etc). Just copy/paste and sync.
posted by barc0001 at 2:41 AM on November 15, 2007