4 ways to scan business cards using the iPhone 3GS

At work, I meet a lot of new people every week. Even in this age of Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, it’s still a standard practice to exchange business cards. While I have over 2,000 contacts in my iPhone, I still have several hundred which I have not saved and entered into the Address Book / Contact list.

I recently purchased an iPhone 3GS, and I’m very happy with the improved camera, especially the auto focus function. The iPhone 3GS camera is perfect for capturing images of business cards. But how easy is it to convert that image to an actual contact? I looked at 4 different solutions :

- Card Scan
- Snabiz
- CardSnap (and CardSnap Lite)
- Evernote

Card Scan $0.99, 10.1MB

Scan your business cards using your iPhone 3GS’s awesome camera and save it in as a contact into your Address Book.

Card Scan makes Address Book entry easy and fun:
1. Snap a photo of a business card.
2. Card Scan automatically scans it into text.
3. Select an Address Book field (such as name and phone #) and copy-paste from the scanned text.
4. Save it to your Address Book.

Features:
- Automatic text recognition.
- Scan business cards from the following languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Dutch.

Snabiz $4.99, 7.8MB

Snabiz is billed as “the first OCR application for iPhone”. Snabiz helps you to import business cards in your Address Book. Simply take a picture, Snabiz recognizes the text and automatically tags all known fields. You are presented with a list of all scanned text fields so you can tag everything that you want to import. Then you can save your new contact in your Address Book.

Features
- take a clear picture thanks to the built-in CameraSteady functionality (3 second countdown with sound effect prior to taking the final picture)
- automatic field detection (phone numbers, address, zipcode, ..) + possibility to overrule them
- shake to clear all detected fields
- Snabiz is using the Tesseract OCR engine (licensed under Apache License 2.0), which is considered one of the most accurate free software OCR engine currently available

CardSnap, 0.8MB $15.99 Lite $0.99

Just take a picture of a business card with your iPhone and click submit. The card is processed on the server, generally within 24 hours. Every time you open the application it will check to see if your cards have been processed and load them into the address book.

CardSnap is not just an OCR application. They use a proprietary processing method that ensures the greatest degree of accuracy. All legible fields are captured and properly mapped to a contact record on your iPhone.

CardSnap provides unlimited cards with no signup, activation, or additional charges. It only recognizes characters in English.

Features:

- Quick and easy method for taking pictures of business cards and submitting them from the iPhone
- List of all cards submitted and their current status
- Red tag indicates the number of cards that have been newly processed
- Details for each card indicating the status, image, and how it was processed
- View or edit contact information from within the application
- Detailed user guide included in application with hints on how to take legible pictures with the iPhone
- Upload cards from photo album or camera
- Automatically add contacts to existing groups

The following fields are automatically mapped:

- First Name
- Last Name
- Middle Name
- Organization
- Job Title
- Work Email
- Work Phone
- Work Fax
- Mobile Phone
- Other Phone
- Website
- Work Address Street 1
- Work Address Street 2
- Work Address City
- Work Address State
- Work Address Zip
- Work Address Country

Cardsnap Lite is identical to the full edition except that only 6 fields are processed instead of 17. The fields processed with the lite edition are:

- First Name
- Last Name
- Organization
- Work Email
- Work Phone
- Work Fax

Evernote 2MB, Free

Evernote turns the iPhone and iPod Touch into an extension of your brain. This multiple-award winning app lets you remember and recall anything that happens in your life. From notes to ideas to snapshots to recordings, put everything into Evernote and watch as everything instantly synchronizes from the iPhone to the Web, to your Mac or Windows desktop.

Key features:
- Create text, photo and audio notes
- Auto-synchronizes your notes with Mac, PC, and Web
- Magically makes text in snapshots searchable
- Selected “Favorite” notes can be accessed quickly, even offline
- All notes include geo-location information for mapping and search

Evernote isn’t technically an OCR solution; images are scanned on their server and made searchable. You won’t be able to copy back the contact information to your iPhone. The free version of Evernote has a maximum upload allowance of 40MB/month. The premium version of Evernote costs $5 a month and has a maximum allowance of 500MB.

Conclusion
Overall, all of these solutions are really hit-or-miss. I haven’t found one that really works out of the box. Right now, I just use Evernote to capture and save business cards in a searchable form.

If you don’t have an iPhone 3GS, you can still use your iPhone 3G or original iPhone with the Griffin Clarifi case. This case comes with a built-in macro lens for close-up photography — perfect for capturing business cards.

Tagged with: iphone 3gs • ocr

Filed under: iPhone • Mobile Software

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