Rating: HSBC UK finally releases app for RIM phones, we think
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You can never be quite sure about these things but GoMobile News thinks we have discovered that the HSBC Bank (in the UK) has finally released the version of its Fast Balance app for those with RIM BlackBerry smartphones. Our guess that this is a news scoop is based on the fact that the BlackBerry App World app store says the current version of this app was released on July 25th 2012. We’ve double-checked and it very definitely is still June 2012. The second clue was the fact that the QR code for downloading the BlackBerry version of this app suddenly appeared on the standard (HTML) version of the HSBC web site.Being GoMobile News, we couldn’t resist the temptation to scan the QR code with our NeoReader (From NeoMedia) scanning app.
We weren’t disappointed because this promptly took us straight to the app store to download the requisite app.
Curiously, GoMobile News has observed an important difference between Google Play (formerly Android Market) and RIM’s BlackBerry World.
With the former you can visit the store and queue an app up for downloading to a specific device from the desktop/HTML site.
When GoMobile News tried this same trick with BlackBerry App World, the system just kept saying it was waiting for something to happen. So we gave up and downloaded Fast Balance directly from the smartphone’s screen.
Entering your requisite account information in order to be able to check your balance on an HSBC account was time consuming but then in order to be secure it should be.
You have to wait for a special code to be sent to the handset via SMS, for example.
After all of that work we were kind of hoping for a bit more functionality from this app than merely viewing your account balance.
Apart from being able to top up a [PAYG/repaid] mobile phone, that’s about it.
We would have liked to have been able to transfer funds between our online saver account and our current (checking) account but sadly that’s not included.
At a time when one of the leading British Banking groups is presently in total IT disarray, it was refreshing that this actually worked.
