Onlineshops are offering Pokens ranging from 12 to 20 Euro. On eBay, they are sold for about as much. The thing is: german onlineshops that are offering Pokens are still pretty rare. However you can find a lot of shops in the Netherlands, England and of course Sitzerland that have Pokens. But beware: they may have pretty hefty prices for shipment.

You can also order a 12 pack from the Poken website directly. The price depends on your Poken status:

• Normal: 119.- €
• Fan (more than 100 Poken points): 108.- €
• Fanatic (starting at 3.000 Poken points) : 96.- €

But beware: if you want to import the Pokens into the EU, you have to pay taxes (19% in Germany). So the final price is something around 141.- / 129.- / 114.- € for 12 Pokens. Still, with 12.- / 11.- / 10.- € per Poken you’ll be off cheaper than in onlineshops. But of course, you’ll have to order 12 Pokens at once.

Also, you should ask friends for a promo code. With their promo code, you can use their Poken status (fan and fanatic) to receive their benefits. For example: my fan-promo code is “PMXKCPHSU8SLKKLPDCPP” and it allows you to get a 12 pack 10% cheaper than usual. If anybody already has a promo code for 20% off, please post it in the comments.

Also, if you know onlineshops that have Pokens (especially German ones), please add them to the comments as well.

It’s obvious with questions like: “Why Poken? I got an iPhone!”. Well, even if there was an easy solution for exchanging contact data (and with the massive amount of iPhone apps, I’m pretty sure there is one), not everyone you may want to change data with has an iPhone. The 15€ for a Poken are disproportionate to the price of an iPhone just to exchange some contacts.

All right, what about cross mobile platform solutions? Well, those solutions exist for quite some time now. The problem is that nobody is using them. A reason for this might be that mobile phones don’t have the means to exchange data easily. Although there are technologies on the horizon, for now we are stuck with Bluetooth as a common denominator for data exchange in mobiles. The setup and handling of Bluetooth with exchanging PINs first is just too much of a hassle to exchange some contact data. It’s just not convinient.

And then there is “e” or hellomynameise. It works like this:

Connect with E from Renato Valdés Olmos on Vimeo.

And this is nice as it works on all mobiles with Internet access but that’s a problem in itself. Even if you have such a mobile, you also better have a data subscription as mobile internet is still pretty expensive. But let’s say you have all this, I picture the process like that: get my mobile from my bag (5 seconds), open the mobile browser (5 secs), surf to the page (10 secs), exchange the ID with my partner (15 secs) and after only 35 seconds we have successfully exchanged data. Hurray! Well, assuming UMTS availibility and no one mistypes the ID. All in all: nice, but not really intuitive. Even e knows this and also wants to offer so called Connectors in the future.

In conclusion: Poken right now seems like the most easy and accessible solution for electronically exchanging contact data. What do you think?