Wow, this was an easy article to write. This Apple Cards app is the biggest fail since Ping. I thought this was a brilliant market for Apple to enter. However, they have done so in such timid fashion that Hallmark has nothing to be worried about yet. Almost everything about this app and the ordering process is terrible. Don’t believe me

So Friday October 21, in the afternoon I made my first purchase with the new Cards app. I wanted to see the quality of the card. I took a quick snapshot of my face outside with the iPhone 4S camera and created a card in five minutes. I was really surprised there were only 21 designs to choose from. These fell into six categories (Thank You, Holiday, New Baby, Birthday, Love, and Travel). There should be at least a dozen categories and a thousand designs. People would submit them for free. Why was this hard to do? Also, there is no way to edit the text to choose a different font, color or size? That’s bad. For $2.99 to have it shipped anywhere here in the United States is a pretty good deal. I figured maybe some Halloween cards with the boys in costume would be great. Well, it would have been outstanding except there are no Halloween themes. You could change the Happy Holidays to Happy Halloween, but come on Apple how hard is this? You want to take over Hallmark’s business you need to hire some theme design people.

After you save your design, ordering is a snap. You can choose out of your contacts or if like me you don’t put addresses in your contacts then type the address manually. You enter your Apple ID to pay. It then asks for the CVV (three or four digit number on the back of your credit card) of the credit card on file. If you have a Paypal account setup with your Apple ID you are out of luck. You can’t order unless you add a credit card to your Apple ID, or Apple makes a change.

After ordering Friday afternoon, I get an email stating it would be delivered by Thursday, October 27. The only problem is that it was SHIPPING TO THE WRONG ADDRESS! Lucky for me on Wednesday, October 26 I received the following email,

” To Our Valued Apple Customer:

Thank you for your recent Cards App purchase.

Due to a system issue, you may have received a Shipment Notification email incorrectly stating your Cards App order shipped to your billing address. This issue has been corrected.

Rest assured your order will be delivered to the correct address entered in the Cards App.

Thank you for shopping with Apple.

Sincerely,

Apple Online Store Team”

It didn’t say when it would be delivered this time, but on Thursday, October 26, I thought I should try my old address since it may have gone there. I can’t wait to see how well they handle the Christmas card traffic. Geez.

One interesting feature is if your photo has GPS data, the card can show the name of the place and where the photo was taken. The postage on the envelope is Apple designed. You get a notification on your iPhone (or iPod Touch) the day your card is delivered.

One week after my Cards order it came to the correct address. I never got the notification on my iPhone. While the quality of the envelope was fine, I was shocked at the poor quality of the iPhone 4S photo. I know its only $2.99, but maybe you should just email these cards so the picture actually looks decent.

For now this app needs a major update before I would consider using it. If it doesn’t come I doubt it will exist in a year. Then again Ping still exists for some reason right??