
If you use Mint to manage your finances, there's a good chance that the smartphone counterpart app is one of your most launched (if you manage your finances the way I do, anyway). While using Mint on your smartphone is an ideal way to get a quick look at your finances, the entire experience left something to be desired if you fired the app up on a tablet. Until now.
Users of the popular Mint service for personal financial tracking have a new option for accessing the service today, as the company announces an expanded app for Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich tablets. While the Mint app has been available for months, its formatting on anything larger than a smartphone has been lacking. The updated app brings a new interface and features when used on Android 3.0 or higher. You can download the app for free in the Android Market, though you’ll need an active Mint account (also free) to use it.
We played around with the app today on a Motorola Xyboard 8.2, and it works very fluidly. Not only are the new graphs attractive, but we found that they make it easier to get a grasp of all of your accounts and how you're spending your money. When you load up the app, you're presented with a pie chart that lays out your monthly spending by category (like travel, food, and shopping), and it's easy to click one section of the chart to get a specific breakdown. There's also a new, interactive bar graph on the front page that compares your spending, month by month. Other than the new charts, there's an offline mode that works just like you'd expect: open the app without an internet connection and the data from the last time you used it up will be there, waiting for you.
A new feature that’s particularly handy is cached storage. Say you go to that trendy new nightclub on 6th Street that coats the walls in signal-absorbing paint, and you’re suddenly unsure of whether you can cover a round for the house. Your mobile banking app is out of luck thanks to a requirement for an encrypted connection, but Mint can save your information for viewing offline, still protected by your personal password. (Ed: don’t buy a round for the house anywhere on 6th Street.) A search function helps you easily find individual purchases as well.
While the additions to the app are certainly positive, we still wish that you could do a bit more account management on the go — although you can add accounts from within the app, you can't manage or create budgets. The app is available now as a free download for all Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) devices, and we're told that support for Android 4.0 tablets is forthcoming.