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.

Google has updated the user interface, made it faster to open messages, allowed for batch actions (like archiving multiple messages at once), and added some basic offline support. The best thing is, this is all done by taking advantage of features already present in the Webkit-based Safari Mobile and Android web browser. So you don’t need to install any new software (other than update your iPhone to the latest 2.2.1 firmware) for this. I would assume that this would also work on the Palm Pre.

The same type of improvements have also been applied to Google Calendar.

Google has shown what’s possible by just using what’s available : HTML5, CSS, etc. You can have interactive, fast and offline access to web services. You also get a consistent user interface over multiple devices. This is a good move for Google, as customer loyalties move from carriers and phones to the applications that we use every day.

Here’s what’s new with iPhone 3.0:
- Cut/Copy/Paste : what iPhone users asked for since day one. You can even copy and paste photos.
- MMS integrated into the SMS application. Supports vCards, plus audio and photos
- Universal Search : what the Palm OS had in version 1.0, and probably a feature that I miss the most from my Treo. Apple naturally calls it Spotlight. It searches everything, including emails from your Exchange server
- Notes syncing! Finally I can transfer over 1000+ memos from my 10 years in the Palm world.
- Bluetooth A2DP. Apparently, Bluetooth is already in the second generation iPod touch, and can be “unlocked”
- Voice memo recorder

With iPhone 3.0, Apple is positioned to at least hold its own against the webOS. Of course beyond what us consumers get, the developers get a lot more. There are also many, many different options for developers to work with. Apple will be releasing over 1,000 APIs (!) covering everything including maps, remote content browsing, in-application purchasing and subscriptions (for games items, ebooks, and more) and control of third party hardware. I’m excited to see what the developers will come up with.

The iPhone 3.0 update will be a free upgrade for iPhones and $10 for iPod touch. The MMS will not work on the original iPhone, which I have.

One of the most talked-about developments this week is the updated Google application for iPhone. The Google app previously did not do much more than the mobile search, except adding the ability to search through your iPhone contacts list. The new update has a new key feature : Voice Search.


The Voice Search is very easy to use. You tap on a Voice Search button on the Google App, then say the keyword or phrase into the microphone.

If the app was unable to understand / “grab” your words, you’ll be prompted to retry. Otherwise, it will take a few seconds to retrieve the result.

Overall, the results are still a hit and miss affair. Much of it depends on your accent and how you speak. The voice engine is designed to work best with “North American” accents. Typical search terms like “George Bush” and “Britney Spears” almost always work no matter who is speaking.

So, Google Voice Search works, and it’s a great demonstration for the power of the iPhone (and Google) but how truly useful is it? I can’t think of many scenarios when a typical user would want to use Voice Search on the iPhone. I’d do it in a situation if I was unable to type on the iPhone’s touch screen. For example, I may use it when I’m driving, but if it was urgent, I’d stop and do a proper search.

Can you suggest any other scenarios for a voice search on your phone?

Browsing around in Cydia today, I discovered that SwirlyMMS is now upgraded to version 1.2, and it supports iPhones with firmware 2.0 and above! Naturally, I immediately installed it to check it out.

Having used SwirlyMMS before, it wasn’t difficult to configure. I knew all the MMS settings for my mobile operator, though SwirlyMMS now has a “Request Auto Setting” feature. It would be interesting to find out how that works. I tested sending and receiving MMS — both worked flawlessly. If you receive an MMS with a photo in it, you can save the photo to your iPhone.

SwirlyMMS is not free. You can try it out for 14 days, after which you have to fork out US$8 to continue using it. In my opinion, most people can live with that price, because we get a full-featured MMS client. When I think about it, though, it seems like a big omission for a modern mobile phone not to support MMS out of the box.

Let’s hope Apple eventually supports MMS natively, perhaps integrated into their SMS client. In the meantime, SwirlyMMS will fill in the gap quite well.

It’s September already, and as usual Club Astraware has some special offers for its members. The member-only discount offer for September 2008 is Astraware Solitaire for US$9.95. That’s a saving of $10 off the regular price. Astraware Solitaire features 12 of the most well-known and best-loved single player card games,i.e. Klondike, Pyramid, Spider, Clock, Yukon, Canfield, Four Seasons, Sultan’s Harem, Idiot’s Delight, Golf, Calculation and Freecell.

In addition to their regular offers for Palm OS and Windows Mobile device owners, this discount is also available to Club Astraware members who own Symbian S60and UIQ smartphones. Too bad there is no discount on iPhone games, but I guess the App Store doesn’t have the support for discounting.

There are 3 double points offers in Club Astraware this month, which are Westward, Hidden Expedition: Titanic and Platypus. Simply buy any of these games at full price and get twice the regular number of points. For example: buy a game for $19.95 and you’ll get almost $4 worth of points to use against your next purchase.

These offers are only available in Club Astraware until the end of September 2008. Club Astraware is free to join.

You place towers by just touching on the screen. There are 4 types of towers (including one decoy tower) versus 5 types of enemies — called “motes” in the game. You can upgrade or destroy the towers just by touching them.

Just like other tower defense games, your success depends on placement and timing of your towers. For every mote that you kill, you get resources to upgrade or build your towers.

There are several limitations to the game. Due to the screen size of the iPhone and iPod touch, the playing field is quite small. Touching to place the towers can be tricky; I still need to do it carefully otherwise the towers may be placed left or right of where I intend it to be.

Once you reach level 20, the difficulty level goes up tremendously. I found out that this was done on purpose, as, the game creator designed the game to last just a short time. This is understandable, but frustrating nonetheless.

You can submit high scores online, although this doesn’t quite work at the moment. The good thing is you can see the maps created by the top scorers for some “inspiration”.

Overall, Mote Massacare gets a thumbs up from me. It’s fast and furious, and the game will be over in less than 15 minutes. For just US$0.99, Mote Massacare will provide you with many hours of enjoyment.

blogged on the move from my iPhone

Remember ALP? Before Palm came up with Nova, the successor to the current Palm OS Garnet, they had ALP. ALP (ACCESS Linux Platform) was supposed to be the new operating system for Palm PDAs and smartphones. ALP is developed by ACCESS, who bought Palmsource, which used to be part of the original Palm. Confused yet? Join the club.

Ryan Paul of Arstechnica writes about his experience using the ALP Software Development Kit (SDK). Theoretically, ALP has a lot of good stuff under the hood. It’s based on Linux, which means it’s stable and expandable. ALP has support for 3 types of applications : native ALP, Java (which is found in most phones) and the classic Palm OS. Aside from PDAs and smartphones, ALP can also be deployed on Mobile Internet Devices (MID).

The future seems bleak for ALP. Since Palm is working on their own Linux-based OS, ACCESS is left to find new mobile phone manufacturers who want to use their ALP. However, manufacturers now have many choices to pick from in terms of operating systems : Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and various flavours of mobile Linux. I guess things would have been very different now if Palm did not spin off Palmsource in the first place.

Less than 2 months after the release of the Apple App Store, we’ve seen many success stories. Some of the applications became immediate hits, like Apple’s Texas Holdem, Band by MooCowMusic, and Enigmo by Pangea Software. I just started buying apps again, and I realised that some applications are now cheaper than when they were first introduced.

Band is now $5.99. I can’t recall exactly, but when it first launched I believe it was $19.99. A week ago, it was $9.99. Pangea is now having a sale on Enigmo. Until September 2nd 2008, you can get it at $5.99 instead of the usual $9.99. Other applications like Funky Punch, Tetris and Big Bang Sudoku have also dropped in price.

I feel encouraged by the fact that iPhone software developers are experimenting with pricing. Some applications, like Simplify Media are made free for a certain number of downloads. In the case of Simplicy, the first 100,000 downloads are free. Some applications, like the new Billy Frontier, are discounted for a short period. Billy Frontier is offered at $2.99 in the first week of release and will increase to $5.99 later.

Many developers have also started introducing “lite” free versions of their software, since the App Store does not have a “free trial” option. Check out Cubes Lite, it’s very cool. The lower prices and free versions make it even easier and more tempting for me to try new apps. Expect more iPhone software review to come.

In the meantime, check out the new apps at the Apple App Store.

iambic is a well known software developer for Palm OS, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blackberry handhelds and smartphones, and Windows Desktop PCs. They are ending the final days of summer with a bang. Until August 27th, earn an additional 20% off any software purchase made at iambic.com by entering coupon code 20OFFSALE0818 prior to checkout.

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iambic has been developing Palm software for a long time … no iPhone titles (yet) from them, though.