Orbit Social Phonebook for iPhone Hands-on -- TiPb @ CES 2010

By Rene Ritchie
last updated

Orbit aims to do for your iPhone what Syngergy does for Palm's webOS -- aggregate all your contacts and their status -- but with an equal and opposite focus on notification management.

So, not only can you link together your friend's contact info along with their Facebook, Twitter, etc., you can group them into various "orbits" (and each contact can be in more than one "orbit"), create all manner of filters, and raise or lower the "volume" of notification you receive.

So, you can set the volume of your raging editor in chief to "high" and your in-laws to "low".

TiPb has discussed this before -- after the rush to Push Notification, we have devices pinging and poping at us all the time and that can become as useless as no notifications.

Orbit [Free -- iTunes link (opens in new tab)] has just gone live in the App Store, check it out. Video after the break!

[YouTube video link]

Rene Ritchie
Rene Ritchie
Contributor

Rene Ritchie is one of the most respected Apple analysts in the business, reaching a combined audience of over 40 million readers a month. His YouTube channel, Vector, has over 90 thousand subscribers and 14 million views and his podcasts, including Debug, have been downloaded over 20 million times. He also regularly co-hosts MacBreak Weekly for the TWiT network and co-hosted CES Live! and Talk Mobile. Based in Montreal, Rene is a former director of product marketing, web developer, and graphic designer. He's authored several books and appeared on numerous television and radio segments to discuss Apple and the technology industry. When not working, he likes to cook, grapple, and spend time with his friends and family.

9 Comments
  • I am trying it out now, not exactly sure what it is suppose to do..btw first (always wanted to do that)
  • no landscape mode...tisk tisk
  • Orbit Social Phonebook rejects my Gmail address and won't allow me to register. I guess I won't be test driving this app, now, will I?
  • I downloaded orbit about a month ago and it wasn't quite what I expected. However, if it just went live, how did I have access to it so long ago?
  • Hi everyone,
    Please go to http://LaunchOrbit.com for any questions or feedback. GMAIL works with ORBIT for the iPhone so please submit any questions directly through the website.
    Yours truly,
    Alicia
    LaunchOrbit@gmail.comhttp://LaunchOrbit.comhttp://LaunchOrbit.squarespace.com
  • I have several issues: 1-my friends status updates from facebook and twitter are not showing up when I click on the update tab! I have to actually click on "all" and then I can see some updates, but they are not all there. 2-My address book goes from a, b, c, w, e, f....
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  • Jani obviously is a Demi Tomato or a Justin Beiber fan. So pathetic, as always.