http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/blackberry-apps-for-maintenance-tasks.html

Contacts Cleaner was also mentioned in a forum post on how to remove duplicates from your address book:

http://www.blackberryforums.com/general-9700-series-discussion-bold-2/244173-my-contacts-appears-3-times-each-how-can-i-fix-problem.html

The final piece of news is that we have a new and improved online help and support center for Contacts Cleaner:

http://beavercreekconsulting.com/contacts-cleaner/help-and-support.html

Brilliant Blackberry Apps - Contacts Cleaner

Contacts Cleaner received a section and sits along-side of prestigious apps such as LinkedIn, Weatherbug, Skymall, Time Magazine, Sports Illustrated, CNN Money, Bank of America Mobile,Google Maps and Paypal.

This book is on sale at Amazon or on the Wiley site for $18.99.  You can, also, download this onto your Kindle.  Overall, this book is great resource that lists the all of the best apps for a BlackBerry user to try out and make the most of his/her SmartPhone and we’re excited to have a section that outlines our Contacts Cleaner App!

2010 has been a phenomenal year for Beaver Creek Consulting and we are happy that we have created a product that is in high demand. It is our desire that this new forum will benefit our customers and that it answers your needs.

We invite you to share your ideas and thoughts with other community members at beavercreekconsulting.com/forums.

Version 2.6 features full support for the BlackBerry Torch and BlackBerry OS 6.

Contacts Cleaner features lights-out processing of your address book.  We have many users who have used Contacts Cleaner to fix address books with 5,000 or 10,000 contacts and four copies of each contact.

We use one-pass processing without prompting you on how to merge the duplicates.  If you have only a few duplicates which you want to merge in a very specific way (you choose which phone numbers to keep), then the best solution is to manually clean up your address book.

On the other hand, if your address book gets totally messed up by a synchronization gone bad and you now have 5 copies of each and every contact, then Contacts Cleaner is a perfect solution for you.

Contact Cleaner does not stop and ask you what to do with each contact.  The App finds duplicates by matching on contact name and then does the right thing to merge all of the duplicates down to one contact.

We have had many users suggest that we stop and ask how to handle each duplicate.  That will not work for address books with 5,000 contacts.  Few people will want to stop and consider each of several thousand contacts.

Our goal for Contacts Cleaner is to do  pretty good job without bothering you about how to get the job done.  We want to make your life a little better by quickly and efficiently reducing the chaos in your address book.

Given how people use their Blackberry phones, a short list of the must-have apps was selected.  These all entail apps that make the busy consumer’s life easier.  The Business Card Reader app is a great example of an app that allows people to streamline their lives by scanning in business cards.

The BuzzOff App gets a great recommendation from AOL as well.  This App allows users to block individual phone numbers so that you can reduce the amount of annoying sales calls and free up your busy schedule.

The Contacts Cleaner App made this list to round out making your day more efficient.  This app, as we have mentioned before, reduces the clutter in your address book.  By merging the fields with the duplicate entries, you can finally scale down an over-sized address book to a list of addresses which is easy to manage.

See the rest of AOL’s fave Blackberry Apps:  http://smallbusiness.aol.com/2010/10/28/what-are-the-best-blackberry-apps/

Within this list of the best Apps is Contacts Cleaner.  They mention that the time saved by using this  App is worth at least three bucks since after its use you can easily scroll through your address book without the annoying duplicates.  I, personally, downloaded this app earlier this year and have recommended it to everyone that I know who has a Blackberry.  Another favorite App that made this Best  Dozen list is Dilbert.  For the first time, you can have immediate access to the daily Dilbert cartoon.

Find out who else made the list by going directly to Fidelity’s site.

https://news.fidelity.com/news/news.jhtml?articleid=201006300905STREETCMREALTIME_10795801&IMG=N&cat=default&ccsource=rss-default

Berry Review summarized this top 9 list beautifully and it’s a huge honor that in their opening paragraph, the author states, “I have to wholeheartedly agree with their choice of Contacts Cleaner.”  The article highlights how RIM often puts together lists of the best Apps for a season. By using the theme of the spring season, Contacts Cleaner is a great choice for “spring cleaning”.

It’s been an exciting few months with our iPhone App making the list of best iPhone Apps just last month. Sharing that list with the likes of Digg and Bing really put that App on the map! Now, we have another reason to celebrate!

It’s in the spring cleaning category that Contacts Cleaner falls into.  By removing duplicates from your address book, you can start the season off right.  Berry Review highlighted this story and mentions that they ”wholeheartedly agree” with the Contacts Cleaner choice.

This is an exciting list!  I plan on downloading at least half of them!  I like the idea of picnic lunches during a hike and an App which can guide me through backyard grilling.  Happy Spring Everyone!!

Since releasing Contacts Cleaner I have been surprised by the number of address books that have 10,000 or more contacts in them, often with the majority of the contacts being duplicates.  It has been a challenge to find and merge duplicates in a reasonable amount of time given the modest processing power of a phone.  I’m on the 4th version of the find and merge algorithm, and this version seems to be pretty darn good.   The customer feedback on processing speed for version 2.0 has been overwhelmingly positive.

With respect to duplicate matching, one constant source of duplicates is Google Sync.  To make matters worse, Google Sync tend to put the first and last name in the last name field of a contact.  With version 2.0,  we have changed the duplicate match algorithm to correctly recognize these cases of duplicates.

Enjoy!

http://beavercreekconsulting.com/contacts-cleaner/user-guide.html

We recently made several updates to the FAQ and you will find answers for the most common questions.

Most folks love Contacts Cleaner.  There are  a lot of really messed up address books out there.  I heard from a customer today who had 13,000 contacts, of which 10,000 were duplicates.  Bummer Dude!  This person needs a simple solution which will fix the mess that is their address book.  Contacts Cleaner to the rescue!

We have settled on a lights out, robust, and repeatable algorithm that will tame the chaos which is your address book.  Contacts Cleaner “just works”.  It will make you address book better without bothering you.  Contacts Cleaner is not perfect, but it is better!

All of this started when I came home with my exciting package which contained my new toy within.  I followed the instructions so that I could get my email addresses from my accounts onto the Blackberry.  This would give me the freedom to be away from a desk and still have the flexibility to connect.  I, now had all of my email addresses of my friends downloaded onto my Smartphone.

There was a glitch, however.  I noticed that I suddenly had five entries for my friend “Dimitri Gumm”.  I had put in her home phone number into the SIM card four years ago.  When she called me on her cell phone, I captured  this into the same SIM card into another entry. Without realizing it, I also put in her work phone number when she sneaked in a break to tell me about upcoming layoffs.  Thus far, I had three entries for Dimitri without really realizing it. I transferred this information to my new Blackberry.

Now that I had this cool new device and had downloaded my addresses from Yahoo and Gmail, my Blackberry told me that I now knew five Dimitri Gumm’s , yet I only have met one!  I figured that I had no choice but to live with this headache.  With five entries, I could just hit the scroll button on my Blackberry, then hit enter and then view the content five times over before I hit what I needed, right?

Wrong!  I just discovered Contacts Cleaner.  Blackberry now sells this app for $2.99 that consolidates your contacts into one entry.  So, now I have one entry for my friend Dimitri Gumm and all of her phone numbers and email addresses are merged into this one entry.  The hassels of using my phone are finally gone.

I highly recommend this solution for the modern day Blackberry user.  I was so excited about this application that I felt the need to write about it and share my find.  Thanks Blackberry App World!  Keep up the good work.