Software & Service Reviews | May 20, 2010 | 1 Comment

Gold Tracker iPad App Review

Precious Metals App for the iPad

If you’re looking to keep up-to-date with a few precious metals, Gold Tracker might be an iPad app that works for you. It’s currently $2.99 in the app store and this will be part 4 of 5 of my iPad financial app review series.

Quick Overview

Gold Tracker was designed to keep track of a few precious metals: gold, silver, platinum and palladium. I don’t really see myself using this app much at all since I have other apps capable of doing the same thing. I do like the interface. It looks very nice on the iPad.

Simplicity Abounds

On the left is a screenshot of Gold Tracker. There aren’t many screens or options with this program, so I’m just including this single picture.

When you fire up the app, this is what you see. It will automatically pull in the latest trading data for gold, silver, platinum and palladium. And as you can clearly see, they all took a hit today.

If you want an app just for tracking these four items and you want to instantly know if they are up or down, Gold Tracker will work. However, if you want something with more meat to it, this app isn’t going to get it done.

Sadly, there isn’t a news feature in Gold Tracker. You do get a big chart with each precious metal, but you can’t do anything with the chart. It is as you see it. No overlays or anything.

As for settings, you can display the metals in troy ounces, grams, kilograms, or dwt. And you can select what currency you want. However, the charts only display troy ounces and USD.

If you need to do some calculating, this app might be to your liking. After entering a weight, precent of spot price, purity and units, you’ll be presented with a total price.

As an example, gold closed at $1,183 USD per ounce today. Therefore, I entered 5oz, 24k, 100% spot price and Carat as the units. The app told me the total price was $49.29.

And here’s a surprise for me. I just realized that when you enter the calculations area, there’s a “Charts” button. After clicking this button, you can see the chart for the chosen metal—24 hour, 30 days, 60 day, 6 month, 1 year, 5 year and 10 year.

It should have been on the main screen. Still, it’s in there.

Final Thoughts

Honestly, this feels more like an app that you’d expect to pay $0.99 for in the app store. Not that $2.99 is a major financial commitment, but it does feel like I overpaid for the app slightly.

While it has some potential, I personally won’t use it much at all as I have other apps where I can track precious metal data and do more.

That said, I do like it as a one-button quick glance type of thing. And that’s why it will stay on my iPad. I’m all about time management and if I can save even 1 minute here and there, that adds up to a lot of value over the long run. So just in case, it stays.