Review: Square (QR Code app)
Score:
55%
Not everybody in the world will have a Windows Phone, so how do you share content from your smartphone? You could use the built-in sharing and transmit your details (through email, phone messaging, or anything else you have installed), or you could go for a more interesting solution and use the QR Code application, Square.
Version Reviewed: 1.1.0.0
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The application will create a QR Code on your phone's screen, allowing you to share your own contact details, the contact details of any person in your Windows Phone address book, or a picture from your phone. This is displayed on the screen, and whoever you are sharing the info with can simply zap the QR Code that Square generates with their own QR Code reader.
It's important to realise that your information is not being passed directly through the QR Code. When Square generates the code, it uploads the information to Square's web server, and the embedded data in the QR Code is a URL to this content.
Which means that somewhere out there the information is sitting on a server and I've no way of knowing what will be done with the data, whether it is archived, deleted after a certain time, or anything else. That automatically makes me wary.
Which is a shame because there is a lot of promise in Square. I love that you can pin the QR Code that points to your business card as a live tile on your start screen so it's really easy to find and show to other people - I'd expect this to be useful in the corridors of a busy conference or press event. You can also use Square to scan QR Codes that have been generated by Square - but it struggles with other QR Codes (such as those used in the AAWP App Directory)... but with Bing Vision providing better QR Code support, a solid history feature, and even faster access through the dedicated search button, this feature is little more than a curiosity.
Square feels more like a proof of concept application, rather than something you would want to use in anger. There's scope in here for an incredibly useful application, but it needs the developers to sit down and think of the practicalities of data sharing, about ease of access to the application, about storing historical data in the application and on their server, and a few more UI issues.
I want them to address this, because a QR generator is a really nice idea, with a lot of rough edges.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at