Android tablet users can now view account balances, track spending and receive alerts with Mint.com’s new personal finance app. This launch advances Mint’s mobile portfolio, which now includes both smartphone and tablet apps on iOS and Android, giving its 7 million web and mobile users a wider range of devices to access their Mint accounts from. It is available for free in the Android Market.

The updated personal finance app transforms transactions into simple, user-friendly graphs. It provides a comprehensive picture of one’s spending by category or by date range, giving a clear overview of the inflow and outflow of money.

Mint’s been an early supporter of the mobile app scene, and extending its free consumer tool to Android tablets is a sign of Mint’s growing dedication to the mobility trends, as well as confirming Android’s own growth signals in the tablet market.  Having already launched their iPad version, Mint’s transition to Android tablets was a quick and relatively seamless one.  While the Android edition seems a bit late to the game, Mint says this was because of a lack in manpower, not an overall strategy for staggered OS launches.  As the Android tablet market grows, so too does Mint’s mobile development team.

“In the next few months, Android tablets are expected to hold more than 40 percent of the market share,” said Aaron Forth, general manager of Intuit Inc.’s Personal Finance Group. “As tablet use rises, more mobile-savvy people will look for ways to manage their lives across multiple devices, so we developed our Android tablet app to bring simple money management tools to their fingertips.”

Consumer data over time

Mint’s all about delivering data to the consumer, providing an individualized look at their personal finances.  As their apps evolve, Mint finds new ways of helping the end user visualize their data, and developing things like historical spending behavior proved a worthy challenge for the Mint team.  Honeycomb’s hardware acceleration enabled some nifty animation for Mint’s graphs, as the personal finance app continuously seeks improved ways in which to present user data.

In fact, emerging tech is facilitating several new ways of delivering historic data to businesses and consumers alike, one of the more recent examples being Lookout Mobile Security’s Mobile Threat Tracker, showing mobile malware instances over time and space.  This form of intelligence delivery and insight will only enhance a company like Mint’s ability to provide useful analysis on a widespread consumer level.

“We’re really scratching the surface here,” explains Ken Sun, Product Manager for Mobile for the Intuit Personal Finance Group.   “In general, people respond really well to visualization and people don’t see things when they look at transaction lists or ledgers.

“So the big thing here is they can really see it, and we can build a lot of visualization on this.  An interesting thing to show would be correlations on your data, i.e., did you know that as you spend more on your rent, these other expenses are going up as well? We’ll offer more in-depth insight.”

Companies under the personal finance sector in particular have been making significant moves to bolster their services. Not too long ago, Intuit announced a partnership with AT&T to offer fast and efficient business transactions for SMBs by accepting credit and debit card payments anytime, anywhere. For more personal finance apps, here’s what we had lined up in our most recent list. In addition, check out this vision of the future of the mobile wallet from PageOnce CEO Guy Goldstein.

Contributors: Kristina Farrah