A Great Way To Put Coin Info On Your Phone

My biggest gripe since getting my Android phone was trying to put information onto it. I had (& still have an old Palm IIIc) I have a Droid X and while the on screen keyboard is adequate for putting in phone numbers or addresses it became real onerous to enter in long lists like for my Coin want lists.

I've played around with a variety of software, but recently found something I really like and wanted to share here. Its called Catch (I believe it is available on the Android Market and on iTunes for iPhones & iPod Touch) & it has an online component called https://www.catch.com . What is really cool about it is that you can enter the data on the web site and then you can synchronize the items you come up with to your phone or to your tablet or whatever device supports the catch app. Actually this allows you to sync up your data with multiple devices. The data can be password protected on your phone if you wish and of course the data that is stored (for free) on the catch.com web site & is password protected.

What is interesting is that the data you store can be more than just text. You can store images as well. So for instance I came up with a grading guide (that I found online) for Lincoln cents. So for instance I have the text description of each grade plus attached photos illustrating all those grades. Now my grading guide is with me and truly portable.

Now I've only had this software for 2 days, but I was going to the Coin show this weekend in Baltimore. So I have come up with some extra topics. I set up an item for a particular type of coin so lets say Liberty V nickels as an example. In the text I have my want list + mintage numbers are available from any number of sources. and then I wanted some rough price information so I found an online version of CoinWorlds pricing in pdf format. Using a screen capture I would cut part of the screen that contains the Liberty V pricing (I Know his is only a guide and I use it as "never pay more than this" guide) and save that as a .jpg file and attach that on the Catch web site. In addition I may do some research from ebay on coin price trends and add that as well. So now with me I have my want list, a related grading guide, mintage numbers and some relevant pricing information all in my phone! it works quite well and cost me nothing.

The free version of Catch works so well that I looked into the paid version, but not going to get that for now. Maybe if I had a compelling business reason to need the additional space and read MS Word files I would but for now I don't need the addl monthly cost for the addl space. But I have emailed the Catch developers with some more ideas that would extend the usefulness of this and they seem quite receptive.

I'm still coming up with more ideas for this software related to my Coin Collecting hobby, but I thought I would share this with you. I started with coins but you can have small snips of maps and directions and so forth, whatever you want. (and no I don't work for them)