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Snaptell Explorer, a shopping assistant program by Snaptell, is available for free at the App Store.
Every holiday season, you have to ask yourself whether you're going to a) brave the mall crowds, or b) enjoy the comforts of e-tail, where you can use the Web to learn all about your purchases before buying. If you choose b, just cross your fingers that nothing goes wrong with shipping.
Shopping online for DVDs, CDs, books or video games makes it easy to do a fair amount of research before you click "buy." Reviews, Wikipedia entries and price comparisons are all within arm's reach, so if you stumble upon something completely new, you can find out a lot about it before deciding whether or not to pony up. Doing that in a brick-and-mortar store is still possible if you have a smartphone on you, but you'll be standing there at the shelf for a while if you want to search out all that info manually.
Your iPhone can act as a sort of personal shopping assistant with several applications available at the App Store, one of which is called "SnapTell Explorer." In addition to allowing the user to type in the product's name to initiate a search, it gives you the option of taking a picture of the cover art, which it automatically sends to a central database.
Once the image is processed and identified, you quickly receive a menu of links for comparison pricing, viewing related YouTube videos, checking up on the title's Wikipedia entry, buying the product on iTunes, reading reviews or doing a Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) search.
Get Out of My Frame
The camera interface on SnapTell is a little annoying.
There's this big translucent bar covering the top quarter of the viewfinder and offering the helpful advice "Take Picture," as though one might not know what to do at this point. It gets in the way of framing the photo -- something you really want to do right when you're asking a machine hundreds of miles away to figure out what CD you're staring at.
Luckily, it's all uphill from there. I was surprised at how accurately and consistently SnapTell recognized the cover art of various media. It was able to pick up both popular and somewhat obscure requests (though I didn't test it on anything so obscure that you can't find it on Amazon).
GPS, Video, E-Mail Features
From there, you can run comparisons on online prices from a fair selection of e-tailers, or you can let SnapTell get a GPS reading to find out what the item's selling for at other stores near your location.
The YouTube menu item is convenient for catching trailers and related video. There's a "Share this product" button at the top of the screen that ports a few purchase page links to an outgoing e-mail 
, which I guess one is supposed to use as a way to deliver a not-so-subtle gift hint (or to just send the e-mail to yourself if you want to order it later).
Nothing that SnapTell finds for you is anything you couldn't get yourself with bunch of manual searches, but the app lays it out in an easy-to-use format that links you to more information faster. Unless you're a tireless shopaholic, this isn't going to hold you fascinated for hours on end, but I can think of a time or two in the past two weeks when it might have come in handy.
For shoppers who like to be able to get a lot of info on almost any movie, CD, game or book they happen upon but prefer the buy-it-and-take-it-home nature of physical stores, SnapTell is a good app to carry around.
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