SnapTell Is A Mini-Helper For Those Shopping For Movies, Music or Video Games

SnapTell Is A Mini-Helper For Those Shopping For Movies, Music or Video Games
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(3 out of 5)

The iPhone keeps breaking new ground with applications that seem to just blow my mind. I have had an iPhone for quite some time, and I can’t tell you how amazed I was by something like <em>Shazam</em>. It allows you to simply hold your phone up to a radio or speaker while a song is playing, and then tell you the name, artist and album. Well, the iPhone has another similar application that can fill your iPhone with all sorts of beneficial information about movies, music and video games. The application that is turning heads is called SnapTell from the developers at SnapTell Inc.

So, what exactly does this amazing application do, and how is it going to benefit you as a consumer? First off, SnapTell’s purpose is to give shoppers of things like DVD’s, CD’s and video games, the ability to compare prices, search for reviews, and even see trailers on YouTube. Do you have to go through a big search to find it, or are you going to have to pick from examples in hopes of finding a match? The answer is no to these questions. The search process is simple and takes mere seconds.

Here’s how it works. Let us say you are at Best Buy looking in the video game department. You have heard that <em>Mario Kart</em> for the Nintendo Wii is a pretty cool game, but you aren’t sure if it’s the best price. Simply pull out your iPhone and open up the SnapTell application. By the way, it is completely free. That’s a nice little incentive to at least try it out. Anyway, you open up the application with the product in hand. Click on the camera button at the bottom of the application, it takes you to your camera. Here’s the hard part (sense the sarcasm), take a picture of the cover of the game.

That’s all the hard work you have to do to find out the information. After a couple seconds of waiting, you are given the match of the product, or a few similar choices. Choose the item that matches best, and you will then, be shown a list of options to choose from. They may stem from online prices, local prices, YouTube links, Wikipedia and eBay, just to name a few. So you have all of these resources right at your fingertips to help you decide whether this game is a good choice for you, or a flop.

Let me remind you that the only work you have to do is simply opening the application and taking a snapshot of the cover of the product. This is where this application blows my mind. The fact that it can recognize an album cover or a game cover, and even distinguish the two to create narrowed search results, is beyond me.

So of course, with all of these great things, you are still far from avoiding flaws. I really did not have an issue finding a game, however, I did get the wrong console for games that covered more than one console, such as Rock Band. You will also notice that you are not given tons of prices to choose from. I was searching for a DVD of a band I liked, it found the DVD, however, the alternative price it offered, was almost $10 more than the regular price. So obviously, not all of the information is amazing, but I mostly had issues with price matches. When it came to links from YouTube or eBay, the results were pretty reliable and accurate.

SnapTell is a free application, and it can be downloaded from the iTunes application store. If you are one who is always looking for good deals, then give this one a try.

Screenshots of SnapTell by SnapTell Inc.

Product Options

Music DVD Search

Comparing Prices

Ebay on SnapTell