Contact PEA

Address books may not be as big of a thing now as they were in the past, and though your smartphone likely features a decent digitalized version of it, it's likely that the features on offer aren't anything to write home about. At their core, address books are meant to be simple to access and work with.

One can thus say that Contact PEA follows that premise, while also providing some extra functions that may be of interest. More pointedly, the focus on user privacy and security, as well as cloud support, make this a piece of software that may well be worth your while.

The target audience is the kind of user who's looking to keep a list of their important contacts, but who's also after a private and secure environment in which to do so. If the user values practicality, then all the better, as what you see here is essentially some utilitarian interface design at work.

Getting started doesn't take much effort, but as is customary for such a tool, you'll have to specify a password for your new address book. You should know that you can create as many of these address books as you want, with each having its own password.

Once authenticated, you can start adding your contacts. Doing so manually should work just fine, but if you already have a list of them saved somewhere, you can import external contacts via a vCard file.

Adding a cloud provider is possible, but the respective service has to use the WebDAV protocol in order to work. Several Nextcloud providers are available, and though support is fairly generous, more mainstream services like Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and so on, are not supported.

Modifying security settings is a possibility, but unless you're someone who knows what they're doing, the default configuration should be fine. Regardless, you can modify the cipher, as well as the hash and key derivation functions by way of the menu mentioned earlier.

Contact PEA is a piece of software that should appeal to a very specific audience: if you're after an address book tool that's decidedly privacy-focused, this one should fit the bill rather well.