Apple Cards can send real greeting cards from your iPhone for $4.99

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Last week's announcement that Apple is ready to revolutionize textbook publishing with the iPad is quite exciting. iPhone and iPod Touch users can take solace in knowing that they can now create and send greeting cards on their devices to anywhere in the world for $4.99 courtesy of the Cards app. Could this revolutionize the Greeting Card business?

With over 21 designs, Cards uses the power of the iPhones camera and iOS 5 to enable the design of print quality letterpress cards and envelopes right from the device.

Users are presented with templates for various occasions and holidays, then they can add photos right from the iOS device.

Once the photo is chosen, added, resized or framed properly, users can write a personal message.

There are various designs and looks to choose from yet everything is intuitive and the artwork just flies in and out from page to page.

Apple takes all submitted cards and prints out a high quality card and mails it to the recipient. The best thing about the service aside from the obvious convenience is that users get notified once the card is mailed or even when it is received at the post office.

This could revolutionize card sending in a number of ways since it allows for more personal and creative cards to be sent even if they are printed and produced professionally.

The price of card plus postage at $4.99 isn't too crazy since you can send the card anywhere in the world.

Instead of sending a cheap postcard from wherever you are vacationing, you can take an original and meaningful photo on your iOS device and send a real "wish you were here" card right then and there.

The key here is the ease of use, with a few presses of the touch screen anyone can compose a deeply personal yet original greeting card that is as good as or better than many of the generic cards out there. 

Cards is free to download in the App Store and should be seeing a lot of use for the next big holiday, Valentine's.