incremental kislev: Slice for Android - Organizes your orders, tracks your stuff

Friday, March 9, 2012

Slice for Android - Organizes your orders, tracks your stuff

I've long since raved about services like Tripit, which aggregate and organize your travel itineraries into a single application. Slice has been doing that for shopping for some time now, and today it announced it's coming to Android. We've been using Slice for a few days now, and it's quickly found a home in our must-have applications.

The premise is simple: You give Slice access to your e-mail account, and it keeps an eye on things, looking out of receipts, order confirmations and shipping announcements. If it spots one, it gets sucked into the Slice app for easy digestion. You've got quick access to current and previous orders, tracking codes, histories and maps.

Oh, and it'll show you your total number of orders imported, as well as how much you've spent. And you'll likely feel a little guilty and wonder where all that money went. Just saying. (Our test sucked in orders all the way back from 2008 – these things add up after a while.)

Slice's layout is excellent. The main menu takes you to open orders, shipped orders, delivered orders and full history. It's a little redundant because once you choose one of those sections, you can flip left or right to the others. But it still looks great. (Update: Slice apparently decided to change its main home screen between the time we got our advance look and launch. The home screen at right is what you should see on your phone.)

Order tracking is nicely done – you get easy access to the tracking number and service phone number, as well as the history of your package's travels. You get a Google Map, too, showing the shipping origin and destination cities, and points in between, but that's really not all that useful for any sort of real-time tracking.

The long and the short of it is that Slice is an excellent way to keep track of your online purchases and keep up with orders that are on the way. It's also got the ability to squelch iTunes and Netflix purchases, which you'll likely have a bunch of, so things stay nice and tidy.

We've got a slew of screen shots and some hands-on video -- and the download link, of course -- after the break.

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