The Official 37signals Highrise Client. Now Available for iPhone.

In short, Highrise by 37signals is a web-based customer relationship management (CRM) solution, to help manage every aspect of your business. From client meetings to PR campaigns, Highrise aims to provide a space for you and your colleagues to collaborate to achieve the daily tasks you need to complete.

Comprised of your contacts, notes, e-mails, outstanding tasks and voice notes, the service aims to help small businesses, entrepreneurs, freelancers and contractors manage their next move. In their words: “It’s the smarter way to keep track of the people you do business with”.

Today, Jason Fried (@jasonfried) the original founder of the company, announced via the Highrise blog that their official client for both iPhone and iPod touch was now available for download. While there are unofficial iPhone based clients for the service, as you can probably see from the screenshot below, the official client not only looks the part .. but it packs a punch!

“When you launch Highrise for iPhone for the first time it will download all your contacts and tasks to your phone. It doesn’t replace your iPhone address book ”“ it just pulls the contacts down into the Highrise database so everything is local and fast.

One of the downsides to the initial download is that it can take some time depending on your connection and the number of contacts you have. Waiting for anything sucks, but what sucks more is being bored while waiting.

So we decided to give you something to do while the initial download is in progress. You can play tic-tac-toe while you wait. Just tap the button and the screen flips to a tic-tac-toe board. The download progress bar remains at the bottom so you see where you are while you tap away your time trying to beat the computer.”

In a nutshell, this version 1.0 release offers pretty much everything you can do on the web-based interface, iPhone optimized, for FREE. Not a bad deal, eh?

Its worth noting that in order to use the app though, you will require a Highrise account, which of course is not FREE and can run from as little as $24 to a whopping $149 a month. The only limitation on how much data can be stored, is the level at which your Highrise account is currently set at. Providing you keep increasing your accounts monthly storage, you should be fine.

Thanks to @BoltClock for sending this in!