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Sharecard for iPhone

Send an iPhone vCard contact via mail.

Sharecard is a €1.59 app from Doseido that sends an iPhone contact in vCard format by mail. I browsed around on the App Store for a way to easily share my contact information when I meet someone. My requirements: fast, efficient, easy to use and a polished UI is a plus.

I couldn’t find a free app to send vCards and choose Sharecard for its good-looking UI. Yes, I know, iPhone OS 3.0 should do this out-of-the-box, fingers crossed. With Sharecard you can choose to include your name, organization, e-mail, phone, address and/or chat information in the vCard. I played with the application and sent some feedback to the author. The next release fixed some of my remarks. A few things I’m still missing:

  • The mail will be sent from a Doseido mail address. This feels like cheap advertising. I would prefer a free app but for a paid app I expect it to use my own e-mail address (idem for the subject field, or the ad link at the bottom). It also makes the mail more obscure for the guy receiving my vCard, not to mention spam filters.
  • Notes are not included in the card. This is a pity as I use this field to add all the missing data (e.g., a Skype or bank account).
  • The company name is replaced by (null) when no company name is given, this should be an empty field.
  • The contact photo is not included, now, I know from my own experience that this is hard to do so I shouldn’t be too fussy about this one.
  • The type of both the phone number and e-mail address is wrong, the vCard source shows type=TERNET and type=bile.
  • All my phone numbers are prefixed with the country code (e.g., +32 for Belgium) but Sharecard removes the plus sign, making the phone number unusable.

Let’s wait for the next iPhone OS update. It’ll include contact sharing out-of-the-box, making applications like Sharecard superfluous or read up on business cards with RFID.