Royal Mail iPhone app lets you put your own stamp on stamps
The new Smilers app takes your photos and turns them into stamps, sent to you in sheets of 10 or 20 with a range of themes. Don't worry royalists -- the Queen's head is safe.
Steve Jobs is a confident chap, but surely he'd stop short of displacing the Queen's head from British stamps... wouldn't he? Thankfully, yes. But the Royal Mail's new iPhone app lets you turn your photos into lickable letter-sending marvels.
The app is called Smilers, and it's gone live on the App Store today. The app doesn't aim to replace your stamps, but instead places your photos next to them, to add more colour and personality to your postage. It's free to download.
It's idiot-proof to use, too. You simply choose a photo from your iPhone's library (or take a new one), choose a round or rectangular 'Smiler' design, crop it to suit, and then choose which stamps you'd like it to sit alongside. And then you pay. A set of 10 first-class stamps costs £7.80, and 20 costs £13,95.
Royal Mail promises they'll arrive within five working days (insert your own postal-strike joke here), although interestingly, you pay via PayPal rather than Apple's own in-app purchases system.
The app is certainly quick: we reached the order screen in a couple of minutes, and logging into PayPal is a relatively painless process. Also good is the fact that we could use our Instagram-filtered photos for arty effects.
You might argue that the average iPhone user is more likely to be sharing their pics on Facebook, Twitter and over email rather than creating stamps to be stuck to printed envelopes.
Even so, Smilers is a fun idea, and if nothing else, will give your nan the shock of her life when she sees your face peering up the next time you send her a birthday card...