Postcard

Summary

On dark and gloomy autumnal evenings such as these it’s pleasant to picture oneself on holiday somewhere sunny, balmy and far away. And what better way to share your joy of being abroad (or rub some salt into the wounds) with (/of) those who stayed behind than by sending a picture postcard? Sending holiday greetings via SMS or MMS doesn’t have that same, personal feel as sending an actual postcard—but what’s one to do if there’s no sweet little postcard merchant in close proximity?

Provided you’ve taken a few holiday snapshots, you could always send them off as your own, personalised postcards using today’s featured app: Postcard.
 

Test device: LG Optimus Speed / 2x
Android version: 2.3.4
Mods: Root

The Android application Postcard lets you create your own postcards using photos that you’ve already taken, or by taking a new photo from within the app itself.
A drawback: it isn’t possible to edit photos or images by adding a text to a photo, meaning you would have to fall back on another app to do so.
It isn’t even possible to reframe or rotate a shot—too bad!

The next step – after having taken/selected a photo – is to write the text. The flip side of the postcard appears on the display and you can simply start typing the text into the text field.
Again, I would like to see more options: bold, italics, underlining, justifying the text—none of this is possible.

Once that’s done you can enter the address; the little button on the left allows you to insert one of contact’s addresses. The downside is that if you don’t select a contact at this point, but hit the back arrow instead the app will force-close due to an error. Fortunately all data is saved and can be retrieved the next time you start up the app.

Sending the postcard is possible from wherever in the world you may be—provided you have internet access, of course. Postcards can be sent to almost every country in the world.

After having had one last look at the front and flip side the postcard is ready to be sent off. Hit ‘Send and Pay’ and you will see the payment options: PayPal or credit card, though keep in mind that it costs one Euro more to make the payment with a credit card.

Once you’ve made the payment the postcard gets printed and sent off. I tested it out and it took three days for the postcard to arrive.

The actual postcard’s quality is quite good: it gets printed on photo paper, making it somewhat more fragile than if it were printed on a more carton-like paper. The postcard arrived bearing a few scratches. Aside from this everything was okay.

All postcards are archived and can be consulted (or reused) via the menu.

Bottom line:
Postcard is a good app in the sense that it does what it promises to do, but I would love to see more editing options that would really enable users to get creative and make postcards just the way they envision them.
 

Controls are okay, though some Android newbies may get confused about having to continuously hit the menu button in order to get to the next step. A button placed on the display for this purpose might’ve made more sense…

The Postcard design is rather nice: it has a nice, modern feel to it.
 

Postcard’s speed is satisfactory. The upload process takes a little while, but that is to be expected. I wouldn’t recommend uploading an 8 megapixel image.
The app crashed once due to an error which I went into detail about in the previous section.
 

Postcard the app can be downloaded for free, but sending an actual postcard costs money: every postcard costs1,49 €, regardless of where you send it to, and it costs one Euro more when you make the payment using a credit card.