Hands-On: HaxSync fills your phone book with high-res contact photos [VIDEO]
Now, I don’t know if it’s just my OCD talking, but when it comes to my Android device, one thing that really gets under my skin is a blurry contact pic. You know the images you’ve set for your friends and family on your phone? Yeah, those. Most of us have set them on a device long ago, and since then, they’ve been forever synced to Google’s cloud. Sure, you can manually set each individual pic by taking a picture of every single person in your phone book, but then again, you also have Halo 4 to complete. Not to mention that when these contact images sync with Google’s server (pre-Jelly Bean), it’s going to squeeze that image down to the size of a postage stamp, and blow it up every time that person calls you. Sounds like a silly thing to worry about, I’m sure, but it bugs me to no end and I’m sure it bugs some of you too.
Not too long ago, Google attempted to combat this “problem” by automatically incorporating high res Google+ profile pics directly into your contacts. There’s only one problem — your contact actually has to be on Google+ (and let’s be honest, no one is using that thing). For Jelly Bean devices, Google has finally squashed this issue, but therein lies the problem: you’ll need to actually be running Android 4.1+ and according to Google’s latest stats, most of you aren’t. Of course, you could always go the official Facebook route to sync contact images, but even then the pics aren’t that high res and a bug in the application will add every single acquaintance from your friends list onto your device. So, unless you wanted that one person you used to go to middle school with in your phone book, the official Facebook app isn’t a viable option. Does this mean that some of us are forever doomed to an existence of muddy friends and pixelated family members? Not at all. There’s always HaxSync.
HaxSync is an application in the Google Play Store that works much the same way that the official Facebook app was supposed to work. It takes high resolution 720×720 photos of your friend’s Facebook profile pics and syncs them to your phone. Simple, yes. But that’s not all. HaxSync can also sync calendar events, notify you of friends birthdays, and display their Facebook status updates straight from your phone book. It’s pure genius.
To further illustrate how well HaxSync works, here’s a before and after of my ex-gf, Chasity. I don’t talk to her anymore because she’s a lying $#%@&, but she’s still my friend on Facebook. And that’s just how Facebook works. In the before image, she was a muddied image of her nieces from an official Facebook sync gone wrong. The image is so blurry, quite honestly, it might not even be her nieces at all. Who knows. The after, however, is leaps and bounds better. There she is at the top of some random hotel in Vegas, in search of a baby daddy and apparently imitating a duck. Now, there’s the Chass I know (psssst, call me!).
Before and After
HaxSync just saw an update today that aside from bugfixes and performance enhancements, adds a handy setup wizard upon installation and the ability to sync your Facebook contact pics over your Google account. Awesome. Oh, and for the 2.7% of you guys on Jelly Bean, there is now a separate app from the developer that fixes a few problems caused by Google’s new app encryption. While stock Jelly Bean finally syncs high-res photos (thanks, Gmail team!) you still gotta go through the pain of manually applying them to every single one in your phone book, and ain’t nobody got time for that.
[Play Store Link: HaxSync | Jelly Bean Workaround]