The review of Fonelink has been pending for months now, mainly because none of us even look at any phone other than the iPhone. It’s the best phone on the planet, and syncs beautifully with iTunes and MobileMe. Sure there are apps like PhoneView which let you do a little more, but that’s not relevant at this point.

Recently my dad bought a Nokia 3120 (or thereabouts as I can’t remember the exact number), a cheapo that he is. Anyway, as all things with technology go at my place, I’m the one who has to learn the device before any other. I tell you, after using the iPhone for ever a year now, I had no idea how horrible the rest of the phones were! I used several of them at the ‘mobile store’, and each one was worse than the other. Settings scattered all over the place, no rhyme or reason as to how things work, and the media players (oh, the media players!). Let’s not get carried away.

I’m almost a phone-newbie and had no idea where to start. After pairing up the device in OS X using bluetooth, I proceeded to sync the phone. iSync apparently does not support most phones out there. I later came to know that it needs is some extra plugins for your particular phone model for it to work.

Anyway, since we were already looking to review fonelink, I decided to give it a go. After launching, you just select the device and the main window loads up. It’s a very slick app, and extremely easy to use. The four options Mobile Finder, Organiser and SMS, Media enter, and Time Tunnel are clearly explained.

Mobile Finder

Basically loads up your phone file system, separating phone memory from the memory stick. It intelligently parses through music, pictures and videos folders, and places them in the sidebar much like ‘places’ in Finder.

It’s got three views — thumbnails, list, column — which allow you very easy access to everything. If you’ve ever used the default OS X bluetooth phone browser, this is a huge win.

Organiser

This entire feature didn’t work with the Nokia 3120 (or thereabouts). It couldn’t take a backup of contacts, couldn’t populate the list, nor could it transfer any information (notes, events, or contacts) across. I couldn’t send SMSes as well, although it point blank told me my phone was not able to do that.

My friend with a Sony Ericcson K750i did manage to it working with the organiser, which was very easy to use. I like the synchronisation feature, which keeps everything up to date.

Media Center

As you guessed it, this is all about music, photos, and videos. Apart from just dragging in songs and photos (you can use the media browser to find content), it also has an iTunes sync. Just specify the playlist(s) and it will keep them in sync. You can also set it to sync only when connected over USB which makes sense. The app will also convert any tracks to AAC on the fly.

For those who’re into making ringtones, Fonelink features a ringtone editor (much like iTunes) complete with fade ins and outs.

Time Tunnel

This is some sort of poor-geek’s Time Machine. It allows you to quickly skim through phone backups (which are automatically done every time it’s connected). The user interface is ‘sort of’ resembles Leopard’s Time Machine, but it only deals with backups in chunks. A nice feature to have I imagine.

User Interface

While Fonelink is easy to use, and intuitive, I found the UI design a little weird. For instance, the toolbar on top had the icons spread out across the tab bar. Buttons had text touching the edges, and others had problems with spacing. This was not designed by someone like Laurent Baumann nor by someone who had some sense of how to design a good Mac application.

Seeing value

Overall this is an excellent tool to navigate your phone, that is, if you don’t have an iPhone. The app supports a whole bunch of phones, those from Nokia, Motorola, SE, Samsung. Don’t expect it to have BlackBerry or Android support though. I was a little disappointed to find that it could not sync contacts and calendars with my model, which is a standard series 60 Nokia phone.

So try out the demo, and see that all features work with your device. If they do, I think you will find this app a huge relief. At 40 euros for a single user license, this definitely isn’t wallet friendly, but that’s your decision to make.