Wine+ by Metosphere
Android App 86 out of 100

Published Thursday, March 3, 2011

Overview

Tested on the Samsung Galaxy S, Eclair Android OS

A free version is available, but I purchased the Pro version for £1.93. As a person who has longed for a decent method of recording my wines, I spent a bit of time choosing my first app. in order to review specific features that I wanted as a way of recording my wines.

I wanted to be able to enter free format text rather than tag a wine.
The only problem with this is that it means you have to type or swipe on a phone, which thankfully I am starting to get faster at ! However, it does not seem to support Androids text to speech, and an audio recording would have been nice. Neither can you tag wines with wine characteristics (although it seems quite good without it). The features that I did like are the simple way to enter a wine and being able to take and add a photo easily.

Wine + starts off by offering to look up the barcode of the wine. So far it has only found wines that I have entered myself, when it does find the wine it only brings back the wine name rather than region country settings etc.. It is possible to search for one of your wines by barcode which might be useful in a shop when I have 100’s of wines.

After the barcode it asks for year, name, varietal and a 5 star rating system. A text box captures the comments about the wine. Using swiping or pecking away does take some practice but you can get some fairly decent comments quickly. Other information is also given such as ****quantity in caller*****, price, producer, contact details, region, country, purchased from, distributed by.

In addition there is a very smooth integration with the phones camera to record the picture. The picture gets backed up to the server when you sink your phone. Great if you are charging your phone and don’t want to have to type away. You can also export all the records in a CSV file (readable by excel) so you can keep a copy or port them to somewhere else. Sadly the picture information is lost, although after a few conversations with the developer he is going to include the file name in future versions.

Performance is OK, it can be slow occasionally, but in general it is fairly snappy. My Android is running the slower Eclair 2.1 operating System, and only a small performance improvement would almost certainly speed it up to be very smooth.
Back up 85/100
User interface 85/100
Usability 85/100
Value for money 90/100
Overall 86/100