If you only download one app on your smartphone this holiday season, it should be ShopSavvy. If you want to convince your friends that you’re the smart person in the room then show them ShopSavvy. It's one of the most powerful shopping tools that could fit in your pocket.

ShopSavvy is a comparison shopping tool. You can find items by either typing them on your phone keyboard or using the camera to scan the bar code. Formerly known as GoCart, ShopSavvy was a prize winner in Google's Android Developer's Challenge. The tool remains one of the most developed apps in the market.
ShopSavvy is a personal shopping companion for smartphone users.

The application enables consumers to scan the UPC, EAN or QR barcodes of products they want to buy and do immediate, in-store price comparisons with local and online retailers. ShopSavvy has emerged as one of the most celebrated and widely embraced shopping apps for Android, the iPhone, Nokia and Windows smartphones, with more than 7 million active users. ShopSavvy’s price comparison engine includes up-to-date pricing and inventory information on more than 20 million products. Product data comes from retailers as well as Wikipedia-style crowdsourcing from ShopSavvy users, who can add their own deals, discoveries, ratings and reviews to the database.

Once you've found a product, ShopSavvy tells you the cheapest local or online price. For local products, you can get map directions, visit their website, or call the store. For online products, you can visit their website or share the product using Facebook or Twitter.

You can also set ShopSavvy to automatically share your scans with Twitter, but this gets very spammy very fast and is a feature I'd recommend leaving off. In addition to finding the best price on items, you can compare user reviews, add it to your wish list, or set a price alert to let you know when it drops below a certain price. I've found this particularly handy for things like games and movies that you don't need to own in a hurry. ShopSavvy also keeps a history of items you've scanned, so if you want to remember the name of that camera you looked at the other day, you can just refer to your product history.

ShopSavvy's bar code scanner relies on the product having a bar code and you being able to hold your phone still enough for the camera to capture that bar code. In dim lighting, it's very frustrating to get the bar code to scan at all.
ShopSavvy also fails when it comes to finding local produce or other grocery items, and it won't find every local merchant. This is simply information not available online. Local results were often missing several stores. 
That said, there isn't another app I'd rather have on my iPhone.

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