Appletell reviews eWallet for Mac OS X and iPhone

Provides: Encrypted password management
Developer: ilium Software
Minimum Requirements: Mac OS X v10.5 or later (Intel-based)
Price: $19.95 Mac, $9.99/Free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch
Availability: Now (Mac/Windows)

eWallet is a password manager and digital wallet that protects your data using secure 256-bit AES encryption. By putting a password to use at startup of the application, you can assure yourself no one will get to the sensitive data you lock behind the walls of eWallet. Better yet, you can relax knowing that you’ll only have to remember one password in order to have access to all of your other ones.

The first step to using eWallet is to create your first wallet. This is then stored as one file on your hard drive using the strong encryption mentioned earlier. Within this wallet (as you see along the left side in the image below), you then create categories and cards within those categories. The categories are useful for separating data however you’d like, while the cards are used for more detailed information.

When creating a category or card, eWallet gives you a surplus of options from which to choose. You can see most of these options in the image below. This aids in giving you ideas for cards you wouldn’t have considered on your own, which is nice. If a card doesn’t already exist for what you want, any of the cards can be editing to fit what you need.

To keep these cards secure, eWallet allows the user to add a startup password. Furthermore, it allows you to lock eWallet out for a certain length of time after incorrect log-in attempts, much like an iPhone can do.

To create a card, you first choose the type. Based on the type you select, various details will be preselected in the “edit” pane seen below. However, you can also add a bunch of your own details for that specific card, or even change the ones they give you. The tabs along the top of the pane allow you to change even more. Using them, you can change the style of the card (color, text, icon, name), add a picture to the card, attach files to it, and add extra notes. Basically, anything you’d want to do to the card is possible.

What’s nice about eWallet is that when you have a field used for passwords, the card display of that field hides the password automatically. However, it places a button next to the field allowing you to quickly show it if you want. This extra small layer of security is a nice decision by the company.

Already liking eWallet? It gets better. On top of their Windows and Mac clients, they have an iPhone/iPad/iPod touch client. While this application offers the same features as the desktop version overall, having it on your device gives you some extra capabilities, the most important of which is syncing. Once you set it up on your desktop client and mobile device, syncing eWallet is as simple as clicking on a button on the desktop and one on the phone. Almost instantly, your information will sync across devices. You can choose whether you want the desktop to overwrite the iPhone, if the iPhone should overwrite the desktop, or if you want them to sync data both ways.

In the end, eWallet is the first password manager good enough to keep me using it. I have tried others—such as PasswordVault—before, but found them to be too ugly or hard to use. eWallet offers plenty of customization, making it easy to keep track of your passwords and other information the way you want to. This freedom is perfect for an application of this type.

Furthermore, the interface of eWallet makes it very easy to use. The only complaint I have is that the text on the GUI display of the cards in the main interface sometimes flows off of the graphic, which is sort of annoying. It doesn’t alter the functionality, it’s just a little UI glitch. Other than that, I’d highly recommend eWallet to anyone who has a lot of passwords or other sensitive data they want to easily store on their machine.

Appletell Rating:

Buy eWallet for Mac and/or eWallet for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch