SnapDat Digital Business Cards

SnapDat Posted in Social Networking on 01 Dec 2008

Reviewed by Steve Litchfield

User’s rating: (6 votes, average: 3.83 out of 5)  Loading ...

Editor’s rating:

SnapDat is a frustratingly unbalanced utility which promises much and yet leaves you disappointed. The main problem, of course, is that SnapDat’s very existence is a workaround for something missing from the iPhone OS itself: support for contact cards. With no vCard or Bluetooth exchange functionality built-in, SnapDat aims to provide a viable mechanism for iPhone users to easily share their details with others. It succeeds, but only after a fashion.

First impressions are great, with a polished front end leading you through the process of creating your business card. Full details are
loaded in from the appropriate record in Contacts, which is a nice touch, and there’s a rather impressive set of 40 graphical templates,
to help your card look like something ‘real’ (i.e. cardboard!)

However, this is where things start to go wrong. Whereas on other phones and PDAs, you’d simply beam this to another person, here you have to pass your unique SnapID to them by email, which then arrives with instructions for them to also download SnapDat on their iPhone, create their own SnapID and thus (eventually) be able to receive and view your business card. Phew. It then gets saved to their own Contact store. Wouldn’t it have been a lot faster to have handed them a real business card or just scribbled your details on the back of an envelope?

For recipients who don’t have an iPhone, SnapDat claims to be able to send a standard vCard by email instead – but try as I might, I
couldn’t find a way to do this in the reviewed version. Another limitation forced on SnapDat is that by spawning out to Mail
it has to quit (because of the way the iPhone doesn’t allow background applications), meaning that you then have to go back into SnapDat after sending each and every email, and with startup taking up to ten seconds a time, depending on how busy your local network or Wi-Fi hotspot is.

‘SnapPort’ seems to have something to do with scanning for new cards from other SnapDat users, but the documentation is weak in this area. ‘SnapDirectory’ is a repository for all those SnapDat business cards you just know all your iPhone contacts are going to send you (yeah, right!), while ‘Settings’ is also a kicking off point for a short FAQ and a Quick Start Guide, slightly strangely.

Ultimately, contact card transfer is something that really needs to be handled by Apple in an iPhone firmware upgrade. SnapDat has a stab at a solution but it’s only a limited success.