Turn a high spec cameraphone into a scanner

Supplier: Scanr
Web: http://www.scanr.com
Price: free to $30 per annum
Clients: Java, Symbian, Palm, Windows Mobile 5.0
Availability: now

EVER WANTED a justification for owning a cameraphone with a specification of two megapixels or above? Well, Scanr provides just that. Photograph a business card and Scanr will employ OCR technology to digitise it.

The Scanr service actually handles three different types of photo. In addition to business cards, it can cope with whiteboards (presentation slides) and regular documents. The document facility has recently been improved to handle colour as well.

The good news is that in order to encourage people to sign up to the service, it's free. Scanr will let you carry out five scans per month for absolutely nothing. Prices then go from around $3 per month up to $30 per year for unlimited scans.

The trick lies in learning how to upload a photo from the cameraphone to Scanr's servers. In theory it should be possible to use MMS/picture messaging to do so, but the INQ had problems getting that going.

What Scanr really wants you to do is send the photos as emails - with whiteboards, documents and business cards each having separate addresses.

Setting up email on a smartphone can prove to be something of a pain in the backside, so the INQ took the lazy approach and downloading Scanr's own custom app, Scanr Mobile. This is available for Series 60 style phones (ie Nokias), plus Windows Mobile and Palm based smartphones.

The custom app is the simplest route to using the service so the INQ recommends readers sign onto the Scanr service via the handset's browser and using http://m.scanr.com as the URL.

The next thing to master is how to snap the likes of a business card with sufficient resolution for Scanr's software to prove effective. This task actually showed up just how difficult it can be to master the Nokia N95's autofocus facility.

The N95 is very fussy about what you use as a background when snapping a business card. The INQ found that a plain white background and not getting too close to the subject provided the best results.

The best bit is that once you've invested a little bit of effort into getting Scanr going it works really well. The business card the INQ tried uploading was read with an accuracy of 98 per cent. In reality the company logo on the card caused the one minor error.

Once the card has been digitised, what next? Well, one answer would be to export it to a standard file format like Vcard. That format readily exports to a Microsoft Outloook addressbook, for example.

For those to whom entering business card information is a necessity not a hobby, it might also be worthwhile hooking up Scanr to a contact management system such as Plaxo. That way, successful scans are fed straight into your online addressbook.

Scanr has obviously thought this service through carefully. For example, so that people can be sure that they're not wasting their time, the web site has a pretty thorough list of supported cameraphones.

And for those who have a really obscure cameraphone, there's a test grid which you can download, snap and then send back to see if your model has high enough resolution to work properly.

From the look of the web site, Scanr is also proving very popular in Asia and Japan in particularly. So it doesn't just work with English. Other languages are supported too.

If you've got the time and the patience to set up Scanr correctly, it will remove the drudgery of manually typing in business card for you. µ

The good
High degree of accuracy for business card reading

The bad
Setting up process can prove tricky

The ugly
Unsuitable for somebody with only a few cards to key in a week

Bartender's verdict