Xobni Mobile for BlackBerry Smartphones Now Available

first

....I dont know. No trial for mobile? But trial for Outlook? No makey sensey.

After all complete slowdown and bugginess it caused with outlook, I'll pass with putting it on my BB.

I am surprised it is a paid app but I don't think that a one time charge of $9.99 in too much. I like xobni on my desktop a lot and find it to be incredibly useful, so I am considering a buy without a trial but I would much rather a trial. For example, little things like if the font is not adjustable, will make a big difference to me.

It will go through my emails, extract contact info from the signatures contained in those emails and add them to my contacts? That could be a real boon!

£6 isn;t going to break the bank if it was for the full integration version but to expect a monthly fee for full service i think somebody's been sniffing glue

too pricey for me. :( At least get a free trial going?

"In my opinion Xobni is one of the few "absolutely must have" apps for BlackBerry."

Am I missing something? Didn't this just come out, can we say it is must have already?

~S

I bought the app. Took Adam's word when he said "absolutely must have" so I just purchased it without a hesitation. Went through almost 2000 contacts in my address book upon install. Closed the app, rebooted.

Now, I hit Xobni again and it's going through almost 2000 of my contacts again leaving me with a empty black screen. Plus, even though it stores my email address and password, when I start up the app, it asks me to sign-in again which in another un-necessary step for me.

I'm going to play around it with it more but I'm already NOT liking it...

Says $9.99, then it says the full year for $39.90, but on the Xobni website the only quoted price is $29.95...nothing mentioned about a half-version for $9.99 and nothing at all about monthly subscriptions...sooo...I don't know about this.
---
Ok, I'm just dumb....I was looking at the Outlook version, not BlackBerry. Carry on.

I would get it if the one-time $9.99 version did email, SMS and call logs...it doesn't, not worth it.

the AOL guy still finding work in this economy..

hudss>

omg, you made me literally LOL.

Does this app have Google Voice support and/or integration?

Hello Wangster, Jeff Bonforte here (I am the CEO at Xobni)...

Xobni does an initial index. It will take it a few minutes to extract out all the phone numbers and email addresses, build profiles, link to Facebook and Linkedin, etc, etc.

So the reason you are seeing a black screen is that it is doing that work. It won't take too long. But this is a blackberry, not a super computer, and the first index will take a few minutes. You can track some of the progress in the status message at the top of the app.

If you are still having issues after that, just head over to our support. We have 24 hour support available for this launch. We are ready to help.

[note: I am the CEO of Xobni]

For those of you that think the price is too high, we appreciate the feedback. We actually reached out to thousands of Xobni users and potential Xobni BlackBerry users to build the pricing model for this product. We knew that for some the price wouldn't be worth for the solution. For many others, they were happy to pay many times what we ended up pricing things.

If you are an avid Outlook user, who lives off the people in your inbox, having access to everyone you know, automatically maintained, photos from social networks, and fully ranked, etc. $3.99/mo is not a big cost (one Starbucks coffee). One survey responder told us, "if you can get me the right contact phone number when I need it, I will pay you $50/mo. This phone is my entire job."

On the other hand, if you don't have this issue, and your current address book works well for you, then $1/mo is a lot to pay. We know that.

As is always the case, we will work to reduce our costs so we can offer things for less. Maybe some would prefer something with ads that was free? We are happy to get your feedback and make changes. Let us know.

Jeff Bonforte
CEO, Xobni

How about a trial version?

Jeff,

Thanks for your comments. I like the look of the app from the video. However, I too am hesitant about buy before I try. I'm very picky about how my contacts are displayed and I hate the native BB app for that. However, The video really doesn't actually show why I would want to buy Xobni. Its an appealing video and has some nice special effects, but I would love either a trial of the app or a tutorial video (something that shows what separates Xobni from the reg BB contacts app, or its competitors for that matter) that would educate me sufficiently to decide whether I want the app. Another option would be a money back guarantee before ten days, or something like that. Just my two cents.

Stu

Filled with bugs and doesn't work great and not worth the money! I just wasted 10 bucks on this horrible app!

Im seriously gonna need someone to make a free version of this app. This app is too serious for words!!!! Love it!!!

I just bought the yearly version. About to install it now. I hope it rocks! :)

Just bought this off of Adam's recommendation and I'm feeling totally ripped off. The UI on the video and the UI on the app are different and I'm having the most horrible time with it. Below is the problem I just asked on the Xobni Customer Support site. It should answer many questions about this app. I would hold off for a little bit until it's addressed. Feeling ripped off here... (don't ever buy without a trial)

_________________________

If I knew that you couldn't manually enter the information, I would have never purchased the application. Because I text, BBM, and call people more than I email them, Xobni has decided to rank my regular spam email addresses as my #1 contacts. Also, I have five email accounts on my blackberry. It seems only to have pulled information from my old student email address and not my work email or my personal email? What gives?

I'm really not satisfied with the customization options in this program. I don't understand how email addresses that don't even have contacts associated with them show up in Xobni and information for existing contacts is spotty at best. Why can't I remove a contact from Xobni? Why does the application not integrate with Facebook and LinkedIn. I mean, you have the functionality there, right? Why can't I used my linkedin and facebook email addresses and passwords and login so I can get all the information on my contact's profiles instead of just the public information?!? That makes this program really limited and kind of useless. If I knew that I had to use Xobni One service WITH the paid Xobni Outlook service to modify information and make this solution work - I would have just waited for the Windows 7 Phone.

Please help me understand these questions... I'm feeling ripped off.

I've been a Xobni use for a couple years now and when I met the Xobni guys @ WES last year I was very excited to see a Blackberry app coming down the pike. And they were only "a couple months away from launch"

So WES 2010 is upon us and I'd almost given up on them. Till I heard a couple of people I know on the alpha I'd almost forgot the about it.

Saw Adam's review and knew he'd been using it for a while and knowing what apps he likes and dislikes I jumped immediately to the buy button.

After installing and waiting for my frozen 9700 to some back to life after the index all is good in Xobni land.

I can honestly say I like it a lot. I may not ever use the stats function (I couldn't possibility care less who my top 10 people are - totally useless in my life) however having it index all my contacts and email to build a database is very very useful.

But definitely is not as advertised on multiple levels. I would not recommend this to anyone at this point in its development & thus will be requesting my money back from the developer.

[note:I am the CEO of Xobni]

Nabisuit:
Don't stress about getting your money back. If it isn't working for you, then support will refund your money. We are not some crazy off-shores company. Seriously, if you are having issues and you aren't getting support in a timely fashion (we are currently manning support 24 hours a day), then I will personally take care of your issue for you. Contact me via Twitter (bonforte) or via email which is my first.last at xobni

By the way, we do have basic integration with LI and FB. We do not do deeper integration in many cases because we are not trying to replace them or make this app do too much. We add their data (title, photo, company, etc) to help you remember who people are. We are not into "uber" address books that dump all those contacts into your AB. That creates a mess. Instead we build an actual AB that works off of your actual behavior. FB and LI (eventually) have BB apps that are quite good.

Jeff Bonforte

hzleyezcharlie:

Don't stress. If the app isn't working for you, we will happily refund your money. We don't want any angry customers. If you don't get a satisfactory response from support within 48 hours, drop me a note. My contact info is in the previous comment.

Sorry you are having trouble. Seriously. We already have thousands of users in just the past few hours and have only had "life threatening" issues like you seem to be reporting from a small number (well under 10). So again...if you aren't happy, we'll refund your money (within a reasonable amount of time, of course....don't come back in a few months saying it doesn't work).

Jeff Bonforte
CEO, Xobni

That is an interesting recommendation. Perhaps you could send me a bit more precise feedback with your issues. You can email me at first.last at xobni. We have had over a thousand users of the product in the beta giving us feedback. We have been incorporating that feedback in new releases almost daily (fewer now that we are live). We are happy to work on any issues you are having. If there is something more fundamentally wrong for you, we are very happy to refund your money.

jeff bonforte
ceo, xobni

We basically do have a money back guarantee. We don't fight our customers if they are unhappy. We work hard in our support to get customers happy. If it isn't working, then we are happy to refund their money. I think you will find our support team (managed by the very capable Eirik Oeyo) to be incredibly easy to work with. Anyway, you seem like a particularly picky AB customer. Perhaps the best thing for you to do is to wait for some of the more detailed reviews to hit the net in the coming weeks. That way you have more information before you buy. We aren't going anywhere, and the product is only going to get stronger over time.

Jeff Bonforte
CEO, Xobni

We know that people would like to have a free or trial version of Xobni for the BB. We may do that in the future, but in the near term it will not happen. Trials are characterized by two methods. One is to cripple the software. The other is to expire the software after a short period of time. For reasons I won't get into here, neither one of these were desirable outcomes for us with the BlackBerry product. We know that some do pursue that path with mobile products. But many, many other apps do not offer trial apps. It may be that we can build a website that runs basically a Flash powered emulator so people can play around with the product and get a better feel for it before they buy. I think in the short term you will instead see our product and engineers very rapidly releasing updates for features and bug fixes. There are still many great improvements and features that didn't make this shipping version that we are anxious to get into the hands of our customers. After that, we will look about a more acceptable (from our perspective) way to offer customers a way to trial.

In the meantime, we are very happy to refund any customer who is not happy. Fighting an unhappy customer is never a winning strategy. We know that.

First of all, thanks for responding... I have to admit, I've never seen a CEO personally responding to customer complaints, so this is new for me and I thank you for your time.

I really love the idea of this application and I'd rather it work than request a refund. I guess my questions are like everyone else's... Why does it only integrate with the email you signed up with? I, for one, use my gmail address for website signups to keep the spam out of my personal email and my work email address boxes. But because I used that email to sign up for Xobni, the program only pulled from emails that I get on my gmail and it totally ignored all my other email accounts on my blackberry. Is there a fix for this? Is this a bug?

Why does it only pull info from public profiles? Many of my friends and coworkers have their profiles set to private. This means that I can't get any information from those profiles outside of a name and a picture (unlike the video).

Also, why did the video change on the site just now? There was many more social networks listed when I purchased the application (including twitter) and they were not found on the application when I purchased it. Now, when I pulled up the video, the video changed to reflect the app that I actually downloaded. But the UI is different on the video than it is on my Blackberry Bold.

And why does my spam show up as my first contacts? There isn't any contacts in my blackberry that reflect that spam. And why doesn't it pull text messages and call logs? The entries are there - but none of those calls or texts show up in the program...

I guess that I'm just confused about what the program is and what it does. The video doesn't really show much and it doesn't really reflect what it does. If these are just bugs, than I'd be happy to hold on wait for the next update. The presentation, quickness, and overall idea for the application is really wonderful, I would just like to see it work.

(also, why can't we delete contacts or hide them from the ranked list? - that in itself would fix one my major issues with the release)

PS - Are there any positions open in your company? I can submit character references.

how would updates be sent out?

as a XOBNI Plus user, I would like to try before I subscribe!

I do brick my phone frequently and I need to if the index can be backed up & restored, I need to trial this product!

Thank you!
Anderl

Hi,

I have two email acocunts that I regularly use, one for work and one for business

I have purchased the software but it can only index the one email address?

Is there any way to accomodate two email addresses?

shelled out the 10 bucks for this program, and not happy with it at all. can't even save the settings under options. no wonder there wasn't a trial version =\

Looks impressive but I'll wait a little bit before I try it, It's nice and works really well with outlook thus far so this could be a winner

I was lucky enough to try this app in beta and in the month i had it i can tell you its amazing and certainly worth the price.

For someone who is in the office 50% of the time and on the road the other half, its a must have. As my BB functions as both my work/personal phone I dont have the desire or the time to input 15,000 contacts. This app does it for you and after the initial upload its seamless, only updating when you set it to.

For those who think its too expensive it just may not be for you. Not every app that comes out for your BB is going to be free or be apppropriate for 100% of users.

If this thing works like it says it does, I could see it being worth a $7 initial fee, and possibly even more. But why do we also need to pay a recurring MONTHLY fee for a piece of software that, once installed, should operate on its own without any continued support?

no thanks.

Well I bought the app, was really excited. Downloaded the app, nothing happened. I could find the app listed in applications but didn't find an icon or anything. SO I rebooted...still nothing. Did another reboot...bricked my phone. Just got a replacement...now I'm afraid to re install...

No ability to delete / update Xobni contacts.

Automatic addtion of email senders to contacts? WTF!

No automatic linking of Xobni Contacts through existing Facebook to Contact connections.

No automatic lookup of LinkedIn / Facebook profiles from email addresses.

This is just not a ready for prime time application and I feel we've all been duped by Xobni and the statements here by the Crackberry team about it being a "must have" app.

I will be very short: no trial. no sale. period. ;)

We are seeing on some devices that our app is only presented one account to index, an issue we didn't encounter in our Alpha. We are in contact with RIM to diagnosis this issue. There might be a fire here after all (for smoke we have been seeing).

And here, I was just hoping it was user error. Rats! You can't win them all. If you are seeing this issue, we are on it, but feel free to contact support with your circumstances. It can help us triangulate and recreate the problem, which is the fastest way to kill a bug.

Grrrrr *gritting teeth*

Jeff Bonforte
CEO, Xobni

1. Settings not being saved. I changed my font size and hit save. Nothing changed and when I checked options again, it was back to default settings.

2. Every time the app starts, it tries to index the database. It may be okay if I had 100 contacts but I've got around 2,000 contacts and this takes a while. I'd very much rather use my default address book if I have to wait until Xobni indexes all my contacts again.

Jeff, if you see this, I'd suggest you check this thread out in the forums.

http://forums.crackberry.com/f35/xobni-438560/

I am still getting use to it, hate having to log in every time I open it, just wish it would open like the default contact app does.

Just installed.
Full of bugs
1) All call logs are from one minute ago
2) Settings do not save
3) I have 3 emails accounts and for some reason I'm number 1,2,3 in contacts.
4)Several buttons are unresponsive.

Storm 2

I'm sorry for purchasing and will ask for the money back.

I'm indeed really interested on this particular product. Let's see some feedback from other users first, however, can somebody answer the following questions...?

-Is it worth it money-wise?

-Does it work better with the Xobni One?

-Can you still sync up with Outlook using Xobni, without the Xobni One?

-Can you sync up with the free Xobni Outlook Add-on?

-How does it capture FB, LI, and other data from, auto or manual, the first time?

-Does it add BBM, MSN, Twitter info and pictures as well?

Thanks! I hope this helps others as well!

On top of the bugs it drain my battery in two hours.
And this guy tells it is a must have. He probably tested in an Iphone.
Removing now , lost the 9 dollars and is is garbage

Just Bought the app and found it disappointing. The video shown here is STRONGLY MISLEADING: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q5HmABPyz0

Even the video on xobni's site does not show the reality of the app: it can't access your schedule, it cannot find correctly your contacts on facebook, it will not show correctly how many times you contacted certain person.

Another surprise is having closed the app and, after opening it up and logging in again, what a joy: it started rebuilding the index from scratch. And so it does all the time. How will it keep an history?

These and other issues have been reported to xobni's support and I am waiting for an explanation - or a refund.

For now, I would reccomend everybody to stay far, far away from the app if you expect the features and the UI found on the video.

I am a long time user of xobni on the PC and love it so i bought the BB version to use with my personal accounts on by bold 9000(4.6). I am delighted to see from other mails that my problems are shared by other users, but guys did you not bother testing this ?. Could you not find anyone with a BB to try a test ?. My issues are
1 Only some of emails on my BB were indexed on startup to contacts - I have 3 email accounts but I seemed to have a mix from all with no apparent obvious logic
2 Now some of those indexes have disappeared for no apparent reason
3 The documentation on the xobni site about a re-index facility does NOT appear in my bold options
4 The email indexes only show part of the actual email unlike the pc version
5 I contacted support and they responded with a completely unintelligible amswer about xobni one , which i did not purchase - see following
"Thank you for your purchase! It may take some time before it indexes all your content, but there may be something preventing Xobni from indexing your existing mail. Would you mind selecting the menu button inside Xobni and select Submit Feedback? We will look into it ASAP"
Guys on my BB I only have a few weeks of email ! The volumes are small
SUMMARY
Big Big disappointment ! - I can see I have same issue as many other users> If I was Xobni CEO I would stop selling this until it works , before you destroy your reputation
Happy to help in the testing from a Bold perspective

I have xobni one.
T got 2 problems with the app:

- It drains my battery, I got no more than a day on my 9700, I'm more used to 2-3 days.

- It added all the people in mailing lists I receive, in this case it was a mailing list for all the students of my university in masters, I have in Xobni more than 6000 contacts now and I guess 5500 are people from this mailing list I don't even know and I've never contacted. and then again, I'm not even at the uni anymore ...

Please change that

yep I'm back still ticked, how does this work with google sync? is it anymore reliable with BB VAD? is there a conflick with bb calendar when ms outlook trys to sync to google? what about my Blackbook app & my i-call manager apps or would i have to delete them?
oh never mind, if i paid for this and it didnt work any better i'd be ready to choke me a dude.

kirk out

After each battery pull XOBNI is rebuilding the contact list. It scans address book , and then only certain emails at this stage it looks like different emails each time.
After recent pull, NON of my recent emails were indexed
Then when emails start coming in it looks as if it indexes correctly, but you lose the lot next time you do a battery pull
In addition you have to sign in each time - and it takes several attempts for this to work , even though password etc is ok

I picked up the app I had it installed for 10 min. I loved the look loved the feel. I did not like the settings not being saved or the fact that on my 9530 I could only get the first 3 letter of each contact to show up in the list. Lots of work needed but I cant wait for that to be done.

I just want the option to choose what I have listed in the top ranked contacts. Such as choosing to have only contacts and emails I have sent. I hate seeing my own email address as the top contact and addresses from email newsletters. There needs to be that option.

I love the concept but having email addresses for newsletters as top contacts is just unacceptable.

I just installed on my Storm 2 for the 3rd time and I give up.
No way to save settings , almost impossible to change the size of the font , and then setting will not save.
The forward , reply buttom does not work. Don't have the call button in the search ( Because it will not save in settings , and so on. This is not ready for release. I send a message to tech support and so far no ansewer , look at the we site and many people have the same problem but it looks like they don't have an answer for it.I wonder how I will receive my money back if there is no one to answer a simple question.
Now I really want to understand how Crackberry is telling us this is a must have??????

I purchased this app 1 day ago and had a problem with saving options... I emailed them and they were extremely responsive and they resolved my issue today with an update... I highly recommend the app, I love it and the customer service is top notch!!!

Thanks Xobni!

This is a great app. The best 3.rd party app I've ever seen untill now but unfortunalety has a limited encoding support so refund has been made by Xobni. Customer service is great. Recomended

I asked for a refund on the xobni for blackberry about 2 days ago and still haven't heard anything back from this company.

Darren

Folks, I've been using Xobni for outlook for quite some time and I love it. I wasn't sure I would buy the up for the BB, especially because this type of app will probably slow it down. But coming here and seeing all the comments and how the company has put all the effort to reply to issues and questions, I think Xobni deserves a chance. I'm going in. See you at the other side.

Note: I manage IT for a company throughout Connecticut.

Paid $10 for app and installed.....next time I rebooted the phone it crashed. Rebuilt OS and just for fun I installed it again but the same thing my system crashed.

Won`t be installing again any time soon.

Phil

I've been having authentication issues with my carrier (Telus) and the support from Xobni (Erik) has been phenomenal. With any other app I would have been asking for my refund a few days ago but with the kind of support I'm getting (emails on a Saturday and builds that aren't public yet) trying to fix my issue, I have to work with these guys. I used Xobni on Outlook for a long time and it was great so I bought the Blackberry version as soon as I knew it was available. Sometimes you just have to work through these things. I'm no programmer, but I'm sure this is a very complicated deal to roll out.

Kudos to the CEO for taking support so seriously. My PC is a Dell XPS w/ a quad-core processor and 6 GB of RAM. I had a paid version of Xobni running for a few months. A few weeks ago, Outlook (2007) started to crawl, taking several minutes to switch between tasks (such as mail and calendar). It was constantly crashing ("not responding"). Restarts would give me relief for only a few minutes, then it would crawl and become nonresponsive again. I disabled several Outlook add-ins, reduced my PST to 250 Mb, nothing helped. Finally, I disabled Xobni and haven't had a hiccup since. If I get around to it, I will request a refund. It's a slick program, but I don't need it that badly. Sorry for the poor review, but I use my PC almost exclusively for my business, and dealt with that issue for weeks before discovering Xobni was the cuplrit.

Tried to install 3 times , receive from support a dead link to download update ,next day a live link to version final 52 , still it only half works. No real ranking , etc... they stop answering my support emails , maybe because there is no way to make it work really. Waist of time and money so far.

Well... I got sucked in and paid the $9.99 for Xobni for Blackberry. It is one of those apps that is so close to being great but it's lack of full features makes it a dud.

* Can't see all of the emails that it shows from the contact that you're looking at... DUD
* Slows your Blackberry to a crawl... DUD
* Memory leak require 2 - 3 battery pulls per day... DUD
* $9.99+!!!!! Come on Xobni! Ridiculous pricing... DUD
* No free trial to confirm how big a dud this app is... you get the picture.

Now if only I could get my money back.

I actually stumbled upon Xobni by accident. After scanning my db on Outlook, it worked great! Looked Great and Felt Great.
But like so many here, I'm reluctant to put more stuff on to my bb (using Bold9000). I tried to sync my phone to my Outlook and got totally denied. I uninstalled Xobni on my Outlook, and I could sync again.

Sorry. I just don't think that's rght.

~LB