Good thoughts all - I looked at Salesforce and it's overkill right now for me - esp. at $65/month.
I tried out Contactizer's original version (still available for 60 bux) and as I recall it had some very weird behavior.
CRM4Mac is interesting because it isn't proprietary for the most part. It's sort of a front end to Mail.app, Address Book and iCal, so if it goes away your contacts, todo's and email all remain. I also think that capturing all (or most) data is a big deal but being able to strike a balance between too complex and just right is tough.
BTW - CRM4Mac does allow for phone calls (I'm looking at it as well -$25 is pretty cheap) by highlighting the name and clicking the phone button. Then start, take notes, hit stop. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. BUT it's REALLY iffy on imports. Missed a bunch of my email, then it showed up, but only some, etc etc. However - I do think it does pretty much everything that SMEW wants - the phone, mail and datebook obviously, then dropping notes or documents onto a contact attaches them - so a chat log or text file are easily associated.
Now I'm onto installing the open source version of
Sugar on one of my servers as well as (probably) here on a local Mac. Looks pretty powerful and complex but I haven't finished installing (need to re-compile php with MB Strings).
I also found
Highrise which has a great pricing structure (starting at FREE) but requires extra steps to capture some stuff as all online solutions will. Last one I'm looking at is
Heap but have only glanced at it.
Still wish I could simply take my groups in Address book and magically assign OF tasks to them. Or something.