"Well like many things this is a good idea but in ways poorly executed. Once you get past the user unfriendliness of the website though it is pretty cool. As a bzzAgent I was asked to review this website and their service and was given a promotional of 10 free postcards to play with.

I sat down, excited to give it a try. I thought I’d use some digital photos I had taken on a recent vacation so that I could share some of my vacation with friends and family across the country. Around one and a half hours later I got my first card sent. Once I got it all figured out sending more cards was much simpler, but getting started was a real hassle. Firstly the sites “demo” doesn’t tell you anything. It’s basically worthless and nothing more than a waste of time. The second problem came when I uploaded the first of my photos. It was vastly too large and “cellphonepostcards” didn’t scale it to fit on their size, they just cropped it around the edges. So I first had to resize the photos. Unfortunately the website didn’t give any clue of what the ideal size is so most of my time was spent using trial and error to find a size that fit the postcard and still looked good. Of course they don’t accept anything with too low a resolution, and they crop your photo automatically so you have to be really picky with the photos you use making sure they are cropped right, have enough resolution, and yet are small enough to fit on the postcard without it auto-cropping half the photo out. This process is a royal pain in the butt. The second problem came when adding addresses. I had to try and add an address 3 times before it actually too, this was merely because there were no real directions and when you click the “ok” button you expect to be done but the pop up scripted window doesn’t close and if you simply “x” it out your address isn’t saved. If you let the window sit too long (and too long is only about five minutes) it won’t do anything at all and while it doesn’t sign you out you still have to start over at the beginning. Just one more thing that made this site very user unfriendly.

Once I got over those hurdles the rest was simple. Write in a note and click send and the company does the rest. As a nifty feature they send you a copy of your first three postcards so you can see how they look. It’s nice to be able to see just how your photos turn out when they re-print them.

While it took me time to figure out how their site worked; mostly because it was poorly designed and provided no real “help” windows or topics; once I got it figured out the process was easy to repeat. I would recommend this site as a great way to share photos on a vacation and much more personal than a local souvenir card. But don’t do it in the five minutes you have between planes at the airport. Allow yourself time to sit down and do it. For what you get the price isn’t terrible, $2 covers the printing of the card and the postage. Assuming you would pay about $0.50 to develop a postcard of a photo you had, and another $0.29 (I think that’s the current rate) to send it you are not saving any money but you are saving time and hassle and that really is what makes it worth it.
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