In this day and age, just about any mobile phone allows you to snap a pic of someone and assign their face to their contact info.  Cool, but what about the people who live far and away or for some odd reason don’t have a Facebook profile?  Enter Persona, an iPhone app that allows you to create individual avatars that can be assigned your contacts. TUAW played with the app and although they state that it is a good idea, the amount of customization, or should I say individualism that you can create is pretty limited.  In fact, each Avatar or face is always staring in the same direction.  But hey, at just $0.99 why not?

Of note, this makes me wonder why Microsoft doesn’t build a free app for us Xbox 360 users?  Sure, they’re are the fine proprietors of Window’s Mobile but let’s be honest, they’ve got a pretty significant strong hold on the market already and if you can’t beat them why not join them.  Without going too delusional, perhaps they could even enable the app to show when my Xbox friends are online and enable me to chat with them while playing or not.  It would also be a great delivery method for upselling game add-ons through push notification as well as Xbox news.  I found this free app that allows you to see when your friends are online and what game they’re playing.

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