Scan, copy and fax with your camera phone
November 6th, 2006 by Gerhard Rasocha
Did you sometimes wish to have a mobile scanner with you ? Well, then I have good news for you. ScanR - an online service - makes it easy to use a camera phone to scan documents, whiteboards or even business cards.
The whole process is fairly easy:
1. Take a picture
2. Send picture via e-mail or MMS to ScanR
3. Get a PDF or vCard by e-mail
ScanR will convert your photo into an optimzed PDF document. If you snap a pic of a business card, the system will apply OCR and return you a vCard which you can directly import into your address book. It gets even better: If you have a Symbian, Windows Mobile or Palm OS-based smartphone, you can save on the hassle sending an e-mail or MMS. You just download a small piece of software and the entire coversion/uploading process happens seemlessly with a single click.
Personally, I use this service frequently for:
1) business cards
2) interesting magazine articles while travelling
3) making quick photocopies of documents on the road
4) taking copies of flip charts & white boards in meetings
Additional uses and examples are shown on the ScanR Blog.
ScanR has become an indispensable extension to my mobile office tool kit. If you want to reduce the paper clutter in your office, give it a try yourself - the service is still free for the time being.
Actually there is another service offering document capture capability: the mobile copy technology and concept you’re describing was first pioneered and showcased in 2005 by an innovative European company called Realeyes3D. They have launched a service in the US called qipit (www.qipit.com) during DEMOFall 2006 last september. With qipit you can use your camera phone or digital camera to turn pictures into documents in seconds. You can then easily share the black and white or color clear crisp digital copies with anybody from or store them online in your private, secure document center.
I did try the service and can tell you it works in almost any lighting conditions and delivers very good quality copies, provided you have a decent camera phone (1.3 + Mpixel w/ autofocus)
I had a quick look at the Quipit homepage. Its great in that it supports color, but does not seem to offer business card scanning, which I found very valuable. I’ll run it for a test to see how it exactly stacks up against ScanR. Thanks for the input.
Hi, this is Chris from scanR. It’s nice to hear from people who use all of the scanR services. Thanks for the review.
I just gave Qipit a quick test run and my conclusion in comparision to ScanR are as follows:
Quipit pros:
- support for color scans
- convenient online portal -> easily allows to e-mail or fax documents online
Quipit cons:
- no business card scanning (aka OCR)
- my SE K800i makes it feel natural to take photos in landscape mode - Qipit does not seem to recognise this in the scanning process and therefore all documents come out in landscape orientation (=I need to rotate them manually on my PC)
Taking all this into consideration, ScanR comes out as the better solution for my requirements right now. Though, I think there is still lots of room for improvements for both products.
One of my big concerns with both services is convenience:
Mobile data is still expensive and my 3MP photos come out at about 800kb. Uploading those directly from the phone will be a costly proposition. To overcome this, I send them to my PC (or MAC in my case) instead and mail it to the online service from there. This is still a cumbersome process, as it involves many manual steps.
I think it will be important for both companies to strike deals with mobile carriers to be able to offer integrated packages = service + data traffic at a flat monthly fee. This will propably take some time, therefore short-term we need a more convenient method to have them automatically sent through a PC/MAC. Otherwise, I think it will be difficult to get the adoptation rate of paying “premium” users, required to finance the business case.
Chris, Having been in the mobile business for a couple of years, I am obviously a bit biased towards these kind of services. I think you offer a very innovative solution with lots of potential. Although, I still have some concerns regarding adoption rate/business case as you can see im my previous comment.
Carolyn…
I found this article to be extremely useful for me. Thanks!…
Hi Gerhard,
You should try Snapter.
You can save ur time from having to send/receive emails of your photos when all of that processing can be done locally on your desktop right away on hundreds of emails.
It saves more time and is a lot more powerful than the competing web-based services.
http://www.atiz.com