In this article I will take a closer look at the People app of the stylish HTC Rhyme. Although this is a feature which many take for granted, you will see that it benefits from a number of innovations thanks to the HTC Sense UI.
The People app is essentially an enhanced contacts folder, and as I will demonstrate in this article, a seemingly mundane feature like this has more than meets the eye thanks to HTC's innovative user interface.
When you activate you new HTC Rhyme, you will be guided through the process of transferring all of your contacts from your old phone, using Bluetooth functionality. Once you have done this, you can open the People app where you will be presented with all of your contacts in alphabetical order. Thanks to the responsive touchscreen you can easily scroll through these and even search for a specific contact by saying their name after touching the microphone icon on the top right corner.
When a contact is selected you will be given the option to link them to several other services like Facebook. When you do this, it will pull information from their Facebook profile such as their date of birth, current Facebook status, and recent tweets on Twitter, as well as alternative contact information such as work, home and mobile phone numbers and email addresses. To communicate with them via a different format, simply tap the selected one and you will be taken to the appropriate app or interface to do this. Additionally, when you call someone or they call you, relevant info from these different sources will be displayed on the screen along with their Facebook profile picture.
When you are composing or reading an SMS or MMS message, the People icon will be displayed in the top left hand corner. Simply tap this and three options will be revealed, which are shortcuts to the phone, message and People interfaces. When you are viewing a contact in the People app, you will see several shortcuts along the bottom which take you to different views of the contact. These include messages, which will take you to your last text and MMS conversation with this contact. There is also a mail icon which takes you to the last email interaction between yourself and this contact. Updates and events is another icon which syncs with your calendar app and displays a list of events which involve this person. Finally there is a gallery shortcut which displays photos of yourself and the contact, and there is also a call history icon which displays a list of the time and date of your previous calls with this person and highlights who the caller and recipient were.
As you can see the People app makes it easy to both display information about your contacts and switch between the interfaces of different contact formats. Syncing and linking information between different applications is what HTC Sense does best, and this is perfectly demonstrated in the People app on phones like the HTC Rhyme.
