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Search, a contacts search app by
Polar Bear Farm, is available for US$4.99 at the
App 
Store.
How many phone numbers do you know by heart anymore? I think I've got about two committed to memory, not counting my own or 9-1-1.
My iPhone, on the other hand, is stuffed with phone numbers, street addresses, email addresses, alternate emails, notes, companies, birthdays and phonetic pronunciations of first names. If you sync your iPhone to a cloud service like MobileMe or Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), you might have an email address for almost everyone with whom you've ever exchanged a message.
For a lot of users, the cell phone has become a sort of personal, digital White Pages. Unfortunately, just like the public, analog White Pages, you can only look someone up on an iPhone by name or company. If the only bit you can recall about someone you need to contact is an email address, for instance, you've got some hunting ahead of you.
However, Polar Bear Farm has an app aptly named "Search" that digs deeper into your contacts to root out the person you need to contact, even if all you remember is an area code.
Remember Whatshisface?
Anyone who habitually hits up Spotlight for search help in Mac OS X will recognize Search's icon, which is nearly identical. Apparently, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) thought it was just fine for Polar Bear to appropriate the use of the image. Fine by me -- too many decent iPhone apps are spoiled by hideous icons that ugly up the screen, and this is not one of them.
The layout of Search is very similar to that of the iPhone's built-in Contacts app. You get an alphabetized list of contacts and a search bar, though Search doesn't space out different letters of the alphabet. Also, you can't add a new contact through Search, so if you make a new acquaintance, you'll have to add him or her to the heap through Contacts.
Start typing in what you're looking for, and Search will narrow down your list with each keystroke. It'll even recognize initials -- type in "sb" and Steve Ballmer's name will come up (if you happen to have any contact info on him in the first place, of course).
Search will sort through not just first and last name categories, but also the organization, job title, department, notes, phone number and email address categories.
For example, let's say you had a big meeting and entered a dozen new names and numbers into your phone. You know it'll be hard to keep names and faces straight, so you add a note to each one to remember something about what they look like or what they do.
Now it's a week later and you need to contact some of these people. You can look them up using just about any contact info you have on them. If you noted that the person in the corner talked too fast and the one sitting across from you couldn't tie his tie right, the terms "tie" or "talk" are enough to search these people out.
'Stinky' Is Not My Name
Unfortunately, Search is unable to dig into all the information you can possibly save about a person on the iPhone's Contacts interface. Middle names, nicknames, suffixes, prefixes, phonetic pronunciations -- all of these are information categories in Contacts, but none are apparently searchable using the app.
Also working against Search is the matter of timing. Just a few weeks ago, Apple announced some new features that will be found in iPhone OS 3.0, one of which is a global search application. Spotlight for iPhone will be able to search through the Mail, iPod and Notes apps. iPhone owners will be able to upgrade to 3.0 free of charge when it comes out this summer, but whether its new Spotlight app will dig into contacts as deeply as Search does is unclear.
Bottom Line
Search is a simple app that does a decent job at a fairly narrow task. If you're a contact info pack rat, or just very forgetful, Search might save you some time sifting through all that data piling up in your personal directory, as long as you aren't searching by nicknames or middle names.
But even if that's the case, this app might be rendered obsolete by iPhone OS 3.0. If searching through your massive little black book is truly driving you crazy, you can alleviate your pain for 5 bucks now. If not, wait and see what 3.0's built-in search app can do.
