Review: Lifelike Cards HD - Just In Time For Valentine's Day!

Overview

Lifelike Cards HD makes it easy to quickly and easily create email cards for Valentine ’s Day or indeed any other occasion, including postcards for when you're on holiday. It also doubles as a good Flickr browser.

Features

Lifelike Cards HD features a virtually unlimited amount of categorized images that are pulled from Flickr for cards, many different font styles and an easy to use template for creating your cards

The Good

Lifelike Cards HD offers a no brainer way to quickly make email cards, without using crappy online services or paying money, except for the one time, very reasonable cost of the app. When you launch the app, you are greeted with a virtual card rack, like the ones you see in news agencies, which is a neat touch and a great idea for browsing images. The app pulls random photos from Flickr to populate the rack and you can scroll up and down to view all the pictures and also swipe across the screen to rotate the card holder to view more pictures in that theme. The app loads its pictures quickly and I never experienced any problems with broken images. You can pick from many different themes, such as Christmas or birthdays or just certain objects such as cars or dogs. Image relevancy is excellent and I noticed no out of place images, or low quality ones. All the photos are crystal clear and perfect for use as cards. After you select your image you enter a greeting title, such as “Happy Birthday”, the text of your card and sign it with a name. Each of these tasks is easily done by tapping on the field and entering the text via the standard keyboard. When you finish, the text is converted to the chosen font. After you enter an email recipient, you customize the email text itself if you wish and then send it directly from the app. It’s very simple to use. You also have the ability to bookmark your favourite pictures and save them into your photo library, so it’s useful as a simple way to browser Flickr photos.

The Bad

The main glaring fault is not being able to edit the card’s name. The name of your card, which is displayed in the bottom center comes from what the picture is actually called on Flickr. The first card I made was a Valentine’s Day card with hearts, but the picture was called “love stinks”! Another time when I used a picture of a dog it was called “Max RIP February 07 2011”. These are hardly appropriate names for a card and there should be a choice to have the picture’s title omitted or to just use your greeting title instead. It would also be good if you could have the picture as the background of your card, not just sent along with it as an email attachment.

The Verdict

Lifelike Cards HD is a competent e-card maker, but it lacks more advanced formatting features, like setting a picture as the background for your card, rearranging card elements or choosing your card’s title. It’s still worth it for the often beautiful pictures in the app and the extreme ease of use. Kids will likewise enjoy it.

Related articles