QuickAdvice: Get Shopping Advice from Friends, Not Strangers with ShopNShare
ShopNShare ($0.99) by Sutjiato's Development is an app to help you scan items and find the cheapest price online, and even get some help from your Facebook friends on what to get and what to avoid.
The app itself is fairly basic - launch it, and there's the screen where your scanned items will go. There's a camera button at the bottom menu bar, which will allow you to scan barcodes.
There is a bit of an annoyance for me when scanning though. There aren't any on-screen camera controls to help you take the photo, and I noticed that the flash would turn itself on without any input from me (only with the iPhone 4 of course).
The app will also automatically take the scan when the picture is in focus and show you what is being scanned with a green box around it. But I found this to be a bit troublesome as well since there was no guidance to help me with aligning the camera, like in other apps such as RedLaser and Barcode Hero (which I reviewed last week).
If you don't get the results you want, you could also try manually entering in the barcode number, which could be considered a nice touch.
When you get a scan, it will automatically scour Google for what the item is and bring up results from various sites online so you can do some price comparison. When you see a result that you like and would consider purchasing from, tap it and you'll go to that site from the in-app browser, where you can view the product page. At this point you can share a link to the product page via Facebook, and hopefully someone with experience with the product or site will respond to you.
Please take note - the in-app browser does not support multi-touch. I tried zooming in/out of the page and it would not let me. I believe that all in-app browsers or standalone browsers MUST support multi-touch, it just makes sense.
I found it a bit unclear that the only way to get to the Facebook integration of that app is by visiting a product page. This was not made clear in the app instructions. I thought that you could share a scanned item and ask for opinions, but it looks like it only does the Facebook integration for sites that sell the product in question.
There is no other social network integration, just Facebook for now. There are settings to display the type of currency and 'new items only', but these can only be found in the Settings.app and not within the app itself. I don't believe that this is the best method for any app, since it adds additional steps for the user to change settings - not user friendly.
Overall, this app is very bare-bones and basic. I don't believe that this is an app worthy of being $1 right now, at least not without improvement. Proper guidance in scanning barcodes, on-screen camera controls, more social networking integration, allowing Facebook sharing of the product itself and not specific pages, and mutli-touch support in the browser.
Yes, this is a small development company, but I don't believe that they should charge for this app that clearly needs work. It has potential, but there needs to be a lot of work done to make it worth your dollar.
