Our last couple of moving app reviews have featured products that help you with a house removal. This week, we look at something that helps with the lighter side of travelling: trips, getaways and holidays. Packing Pro is not about moving house, but taking the home with you in the suitcase. Let’s unpack it.
Packing Pro has a solid arsenal of list-making, organising and reminder features. These include:
Packing Pro is very thorough. Not only does it list things, it also apportions items to different members of the family, creates subcategories, juggles quantities and much more besides. If you went through every option available, even a total stranger would have no problem understanding where you’re going and what you’ll need. Everything from destination temperature to food prep and even clothes washing options are catered for!
When all is said and done, sometimes it’s nice just to examine the list on a piece of paper. Packing Pro allows you to export your files and print them the old fashioned way. This is great. In spite of touch screens and fancy apps, sometimes we just like to tick things off with a pencil. This means that the head of the family can work on the app, while others run around the house with the list in their pockets. Smart.
From a UI perspective, we really liked the way the categories open and collapse when you tap them. That makes it easy to see hundreds of items at the push of a finger without feeling overwhelmed by the number of things you’re going away with.
Well, yes. A removal is similar to a holiday, except that you don’t tend to make a return journey! With all its features, Packing Pro is a viable app to use for moving house.
Packing Pro is a good app, there’s no doubt about that. Its principal purpose is to make lists and with the above features, it certainly does that. If there are any drawbacks, it’s that it is overburdened with features.
The settings in Packing Pro are innumerable; change designs with a colour wheel, alter fonts, change capitalisation, currency, sorting, filters - the list goes on. For people who are stressed with planning a trip, this amount of detail might be too much. While it’s nice to style and control your own app in this way, sometimes it’s best to leave design features to the experts. If the app created a cool, clutter-free environment in which to organise your trip to Disneyland, the experience might be a bit easier.
Another drawback could be the fact that this app has a price tag right out of the box. Though £2.29 is a small figure, it could be enough to deter the mobile market, who are known to be tight-fisted. Like many apps before it, Packing Pro could try releasing a free version with ads to win over the more casual customer.
A strong list-making application that, if used properly, will save a lot of stress when planning your trips away. It could benefit from a simpler UI and fewer options, but that’s probably not worth crying about. Well done Packing Pro!