This review originally appeared within iLounge’s iOS Gems series within the compilation article, iPhone Gems: All 22 Wallet Apps, Reviewed. Additional details may be found in the original article.
Cards (Free) is one of only three free wallet applications available on the App Store at this point. For the price tag, it offers reasonable, albeit very basic functionality.
Cards is designed to store credit card, ATM card, and bank account information only, and provides fixed fields for these three item types, with no ability to support customized fields for either these existing item types or any ability to create new item types. Existing fields include information such as standard credit/ATM card or bank account information, PINs, customer service phone numbers and a security question/answer.
Within each item, cards does provide context-appropriate fields, with a numeric entry pad for numeric fields, a date browser for date fields, and hidden/masked fields for information such as CVV (credit card security codes), PIN numbers and security question answer fields. These fields are masked when viewing a record, and you must actually enter “edit” mode to see their content.
Note that these fields are also not masked during actual data entry, only after the record is actually saved. Interestingly, multiple PIN numbers are supported.
Cards does not support any kind of intruder detection, meaning that somebody could load up the application and repeatedly try to guess your password. This is further complicated by the fact that the application doesn’t actually provide any means for changing your password—if you decide you want to use a new password, you basically have to uninstall and reinstall the application, losing all of your actual data in the process.
As a free application for storing only bank account and credit card information, Cards would be a reasonable choice for the price were it not for the absence of any kind of password management capabilities.
