You can do all kinds of fancy things with mobile phones these days. Take ShopSavvy, for instance: it lets you shop online for the best deals simply by pointing your phone's camera at the barcode of the item you're interested in. We've been giving it a spin on the Nokia C5-03 to find out more. 

Check out our Nokia C5-03 review roundup

The science behind ShopSavvy is relatively simple. The image of a barcode is captured by your phone's camera, then decoded by the ShopSavvy software. From there you can search for deals online, find local shops, create lists of shopping items or share the details with your contacts.

It's a concept with plenty of potential, but does it really work as simply as that? We wish it did, but sadly it doesn't.

The first issue is that some phones' cameras are better than others. And while the Nokia C5-03's 5-megapixel snapper is far from the worst mobile camera around, it nonetheless struggled to focus on the barcodes we tried scanning in our tests.

Generally speaking, it took a good 30 seconds of trying before the barcode was finally recognised, and we expect lower-spec cameras might have it even worse.

But the real sin here is that there's no way to set your location, and because ShopSavvy is a US-based service, all results are delivered in US dollars. One of our test products was a packet of sweets that we know sells for £1 at our local supermarket. Yet ShopSavvy's suggestion was a British Novelty Food shop. And the price? $5.

It's a shame really, as we can really see the appeal elsewhere, and we assume our difficulty in scanning barcodes would ease once we were a bit more used to the software. But unfortunately, as long as ShopSavvy assumes everyone using its app is located in the United States, there's no way we can recommend it.

DOWNLOAD: ShopSavvy
Size: 0.74MB
Price: Free