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SnapTell Explorer for iPhone

What is it?

SnapTell Explorer is a pretty sweet comparison shopping and product information application for DVDs, CDs, video games, and books. After taking a picture of a product, SnapTell matches the image with an actual product and returns results from Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Rotten Tomatoes, eBay, Barnes and Noble, and other relevant sites.

How much does it cost?

Free.

Who is it good for?

People who shop for lots of media and want to comparison shop or get more information before they buy. Bargain hunters when it comes to media and people who don’t require immediate gratification when it comes to purchasing these products. This is not an application to compare prices on turkey, Bear Claw donuts, or Prada shades - it is for books, CDs, DVDs, and video games ONLY (but people keep trying to use the app for purposes other than what it’s supposed to be used for, just in case).

Summary

SnapTell is one of the coolest iPhone applications available, despite the fact it’s not the smoothest interface possible.

How? You ask?

Since the iPhone’s camera lens currently makes barcode scanning impossible without an attachment to let iPhone users utilize something like ShopSavvy for Google Android, SnapTell is one of the closest shopping apps that we have this side of Amazon Remembers. You snap a picture and get a bunch of prices and product information from around the web based on the type of product that you’re looking at. If it’s a movie, you get Rotten Tomatoes numbers and IMDb pages. If it’s a song, you get links to iTunes and YouTube. But really, what makes SnapTell really cool is just how accurate it generally is with identifying the product.

Even if your picture is slightly distorted, it generally pulls the right item and sends you to the relevant pages via Safari. Sure, it would be nice if you were going to an iPhone optimized page everytime, but the pages that get returned to you are relevant and useful, especially if you’re shopping or deciding to pull the trigger on a DVD. Overall, it’s a great shopping and information companion that stops you from having to go to each of these sites individually, which is not necessarily a “need,” but it’s a very great “nice to have” and it’s a very cool way to show off new technology at the same time.

Keep it or Delete it?

Keep it.

Not only is this app really cool, but it’s pretty useful.

As iPhone users, we all know how Safari isn’t the most stable browser in the world - especially for those of us who have loaded up on applications, so manually going to page after page on your phone is going to inevitably lead to a few crashes here and there. Even though the “ooh’s and ahh’s” of SnapTell is really just the fact that you can take a picture and get relevant results, SnapTell is really just a new way for you to search for product information on your phone.

Instead of trying to think of some top sites and ways to find information about a media purchase, you can snap one picture, wait less than a minute for the result, and have a buttload of information returned to you before you make your purchase.

One of our main gripes with the application, however, is the quality of results that get returned on some of the more search-dependent results.

On some, it works great. Like on Amazon, you’re able to make a purchase through their iPhone optimized site after being matched up with the product you took a picture of. On others, like YouTube, you’re often left with results that aren’t necessarily what you’re looking for due to some clever tagging by YouTubers.

Chances are you’re not going to buy through your iPhone using the pages returned to you via SnapTell. How you’ll likely use the application is more as a comparison shopping tool or a sanity check before making an impulse media buy. You can check reviews for movies, online prices, and even read a little bit about a show before taking the plunge on Wikipedia.

Using the application is a lot of fun too - doing exactly what you’d hope for it to do, without the use of a barcode. Whether it’s the actual product or a picture of a product that you find online, SnapTell is still able to decode the image and return relevant results - even differentiating between a DVD cover and a CD soundtrack cover.

We admit that as an actual ecommerce shopping instrument, SnapTell Explorer leaves a good to be desired, simply because it’s working through a lot of different sites and has to link out via Safari to access the pages. But as a new way to search for comparison shopping, there are few apps out there that are cooler than SnapTell, this side of ShopSavvy. Not only is this a good one to show off, but it’s a good one to have if you’re still one of the few who still goes to stores and hasn’t decided to start downloading everything.