You can now link your T-Mobile G1 with your Highrise account. I’ve heard the G1 called a “toy” by early adopters who simply wanted to play with it rather than actually use it for business. Well, thanks to a third-party app, it’s not just a toy.
The leader of business smartphones is obviously RIM with their line of Blackberry phones. Blackberry phones link back to the mail server at work and can even synchronize contacts with your desktop computer. Often those contacts will also link to your company’s CRM. The same holds for Windows Mobile based phones. For the Corporate Ninja, the Blackberry or Windows Mobile phone is the weapon of choice. For the Freelance Ninja without an Intranet, however, the G1’s link to Gmail doesn’t just end with synchronized contacts on your PC. You can now synchronize your G1 phone and your Highrise account too, which serves like an Intranet and CRM of sorts.
According to 37 Signals, you can now synchronize your Gmail contacts with your Highrise account through a third-party application called Soocial. This means that your Highrise CRM will always have the most recent contact information as input on your G1. This saves you the headache of double entry and having to merge duplicate contacts when somebody changes their email address on you. This will undoubtedly save you time and effort having to manually synchronize.
I’ve had the opportunity to use Soocial for the past couple of weeks. My Highrise and Gmail contacts were synchronized overnight, making it faster and more convenient to send off the quick email rather than have to switch screens to look up an email address.
There is more. With other smartphones, besides the iPhone, you cannot browse Highrise from the mobile browser. So, if you need to search for a note on a customer while you are on the go, neither the Blackberry nor Windows Mobile browsers can properly render Highrise. The G1 has no such problem. You can definitely browse your Highrise account and navigate it successfully on the G1 browser. For the freelancer who depends on being out of the office, this is a great benefit as you no longer need to open up the laptop to access your Highrise records. It means true freedom and time savings.
