If you’re one of the 500k people who use Mint and also own an iPhone, I suspect you had just about the same reaction. The funny thing is that I only started using Mint about a month ago and I’m completely in love with it. The fact that all I have to do is open the app and I can see all my up to date financial info… is astonishing.

I had written a post a while ago about some concept iPhone apps I’d love to have, and an HSBC app was on that list. My reasoning was that I hate having to spend so long each time I log into my bank account online. I thought with such a flexible platform such as the iPhone, there much be a quicker way. Unfortunately there wasn’t a way to connect directly to my bank account over the iPhone… keyword being “directly”. Mint’s iPhone app allows me to indirectly view real time account information including the available balance, and transation history. So instead of creating a mock-up of what an HSBC iPhone app might look like, I’m going to pump up Mint’s tire here a bit and give them a review.

The good stuff:

• Cool badge graphic (seriously it’s important to me)
• Simple interface – The only sections which you can ‘click’ to from the front page are: “accounts”, “budget”, “cash flow”, and “investments” but most of them go 2 more levels deep. For instance, you can go to Accounts > checking account > transaction history, and it will show you a list broken down by day with the merchant, category, and total amounts listed.
• Robust feature set – As far as I can tell the transaction history goes all the way back to the beginning of your record – and fast. The interface is minimalistic and fairly usable. Being able to break down your information by budget or cash flow, and by category, time frame, or merchant is really more than I would have asked for in the first release of this app so I’m not going to complain here.

Stuff I’d like to see in a future version:

• Investment account details – as it stands now you cannot view any levels beyond seeing the total value of your investments. Wheras on the web app, you can do all sorts of cool stuff like tracking the performance of each individual stock, etc.
• Better usability queues – I find it annoying that the investment section doesn’t look like you can’t click an account. It looks like the other pages where you CAN click the account and get more information. At the very least add a colored border to clickable sections or something.

Summary

This is a solid iPhone app and should be on the front page of your iPhone if you are a Mint.com user. I have no idea about any plans for new features but I know that as soon as I see it the Updates section of the app store I’ll probably have another total nerd meltdown because I’m a total app store geek

I remember sitting at my parents old 386x PC in the morning playing the original Maxis SimCity Classic, setting the speed to high just to get enough cash to buy that airport before I had to leave for school. That original feeling hasn’t really changed (neither has the veil of complexity that is their city development intelligence).

What I like about this app:

• Highly usable interface – It’s interesting that when there is such an intense challenge as the space constraints that the iPhone screen imposes on game developers, they are innovative and produce a highly usable product. It doesn’t seem like much thought is really put into a lot of things in out lives so this is an interesting phenomena. The controls and overall feel of the game is so fluid and well thought out you don’t even notice it. I mean, maybe it’s not 100% easy to place items on the grid, and I’m not saying I haven’t screwed up a bunch of times. I’m saying that the way they went and customized the controls to suit the screen constraints is brilliant and makes me feel humbled that someone would pay so much attention to me.
• Beautiful graphics – The interface graphics, the motion design, and the in game graphics themselves are great. They’re very “Web 2.0 for games (??)” … I mean shiny. Very appealing and the music and sfx are well done to boot.

Summary

On it’s initial release I had some issues (as did many others) with loading the app (at all). There was some kind of memory issue which caused the app to take a while to load, and so what you’d see was a white blank screen for a while, and then eventually the game would “start”. I suspect that what they did to fix it was to just replace the white screen with a “loading” screen. I honestly can’t tell if it’s quicker to load now or not, but the point is that it opens completely every time and I don’t notice any problems.

I have kind of taken a break from this game for a while after about a solid 2 weeks of playing it like it was crack. So for me, the replayability of it is limited. Overall I think I got my money’s worth and I’m happy to have it at my disposal if I ever feel the urge to buldoze some slums.

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