A word to the wise – if you are planning on launching a shopping list mobile app with social functions, you might want to pick a short and snappy domain name for your website which will, after all, be the hub of your service. Yes, makers of Shoppy, we are looking at you with your ridiculous URL. Find out whether Shoppy is worth downloading from the Nokia Ovi Store with out Shoppy app review…

Despite this rather glaring schoolboy error we rather like Shoppy. It is a simple idea – a mobile list app that lets you input items and quantities either on the web or on your phone.

Presentation is top notch, with pleasingly clear type and a well chosen colour scheme on the ‘list of lists’ front page and a cute ring-notebook effect for the actual lists themselves. It doesn’t add any fuctionality to the app, but it does make it a little more pleasant to use.

You can create multiple lists, each containing as many items as you like. Items are added in ‘Edit’ mode and are categorised (Food, Fruit & veg, clothing, etc.) with a catch-all ‘other’ category for anything out of the ordinary. In practice, these categories don’t do very much and you can sort or search by them, which is a shame.

In ‘Shop’ mode, your lists have a check box next to each item. Tapping the box marks it with a nice Tick and both greys out and draws a line through the item. Weirdly, although you can specify a quantity of an item when creating your list, there is no facility to only buy some of the quantity that you need. If you need 12 cabbages then you can either say you have bought all 12 or that you have bought none, which does render the quantity feature a bit pointless.

Sadly, this kind of carelessness does occur throughout the app – ‘veggies’ is misspelt as ‘veegies’ and we encountered more than a couple of ’script errors’ that meant we had to reenter list items. The web interface suffers from a similar lack of testing and wobbly coding.

Despite this we did warm to the app. It is useful as far as it goes and the ability to share lists with others is genuinely useful – as is the ability for you to go out shopping while your other half updates your shopping list from their PC as ideas occur to them. With a bit of polish (and a more memorable URL) Shoppy could be a real winner.