Free for iPhone
Free for Android

Description

Tired of having to fill your purse or wallet with the huge variety of club membership cards and rewards cards that you need to in order to take advantage of discounts or rack up participation points? You're in luck. There's an app for that, too. It's called CardStar, and it works by converting plastic to readable bits on your iPhone or Android. Once you've found the desired card merchant in the CardStar database, you can either manually enter your membership number or physically scan your plastic card into your phone with the reader that utilizes your mobile device's camera. Once loaded into the app, a scannable rewards card barcode is displayed so that the next time you're at checkout, all the cashier has to do is swipe your smartphone screen.

The Good

If you've ever been stuck at the register fumbling through the mountainous stack of rewards cards crowding your pocketbook or dangling from the end of a half-pound keychain, one quick look at the description of this application could elicit a sigh of relief. Besides, while it's highly likely that you'll leave home frequently without all of your rewards cards in tow, how often do you forget to bring along your cell phone? For that very reason, CardStar is a borderline-genius advancement for those of us who just can't seem to stop misplacing our merchant rewards cards.

The Bad

It is easy enough to enter your reward card information, but manually typing the numbers into your smartphone can become tedious if you are entering multiple cards at once. The app allows you to enter the reward card information by scanning your reward cards with your smartphone's camera, but this feature requires an additional app called Barcode Scanner. The scanning feature works very well, but having to download an additional app can be annoying, especailly when you already have another barcode scanning app on your phone.  

The Bottom Line

Few smartphone apps actually boast the kind of functionality that CardStar does, which makes it possible to travel and shop with less baggage. This application isn't intended specifically for people in the process of moving, but considering how light you have to travel when making a cross-country trek to a new hometown, it can certainly come in handy to have all of that rewards information loaded into your phone when you need it.

Image credit: iTunes