You're at some dull tech conference and somebody want to give you yet another business card. Only this time, you actually want to keep their details and you know that if you accept the dead-tree token it'll end up in your wallet, only to be seen again when you're sitting at a particularly wobbly restaurant table.

But if you have Handshake, a new, free iPhone application, you can quickly and easily swap your contact details with them. Like any app of this type, it needs both parties to be running it, but with that caveat, Handshake looks like a very easy way to network:

The iPhones don't connect directly to each other – instead the connection goes via Handshake's server, so unless you have good Wi-Fi then this is pretty useless for the iPod Touch (although it will run). According to the FAQ, no details are retained on the server after the transfer has taken place. You can also choose not to sync the "notes" field in your contact info, although you shouldn't really have your ATM PIN in there anyway.

The free version is ad-supported, and you can pay $3 for an ad-free upgrade. One tip – it might be a good idea to set your iPhone to put all contacts created on the phone into a special address book group (you can do this in iTunes). That way it will be easy to delete the details of the dull, dandruff-scattering company rep you just couldn't say no to.

Right now, there is a problem if you have more than 300 contacts in your adress book: the app will not launch. The fix has already been posted, and is trickling through the Apple approval process. As Chairman Gruber says over at Daring Fireball, this "Should be a built-in iPhone feature".

Product page [Get Handshake via ★ ]