An Office in Your Hand: using your phone for FAX, scan, and copy

Are you a mobile warrior that considers that Fed/Ex Kinko's card and a list of their locations to be one of your most important assets? Well, I am here to free you from tracking them down, driving to their store, and spending large amounts of money to copy and FAX that latest business agreement or contract draft. I have been using scanR quite a bit lately to FAX some documents across the country, and there are two other services that look good as well that I will mention. What this boils down to are fewer expense reports and time saved, which translates directly into more time at the bar, and who couldn't use a bit extra of that after a long work day?

The Problem: I had a lengthy application that needed to get from Florida to Ohio in a timely manner, but no FAX machine and at approximately $2 per page, using FedEX/Kinko's was cost-prohibitive. I knew about eFax and have used them to receive facsimiles, but I had no way to scan the paper into a format they could read, and it was a semi-useful service with a pretty steep monthly fee.

The Solution: I own a Nokia N82 which has a high-resolution camera on it, so I knew there had to be a better way. After a quick bit of searching, I found scanR, a service that had a monthly, quarterly, and yearly payment plans. I ended up going for the quarterly for $9.95, which was basically getting a month free over and above the monthly plan. Point the phone over at m.scanR.com and they do a great job of walking you through the service. It will download an app to your phone, start the app, and run you through the tutorial. From the time I hit the web page with my phone, I had a scan up on their site and fax'd to my parents' fax machine within five minutes. Also, once you take the scan, make sure to use the "view scan" option in the app. This login procedure is what connects the device to your online scanR account.
Another great feature of scanR is that it does Optical Character Recognition (OCR) with the scans. This is a process by which it goes through and converts the letters and words in the image to actual, editable text for easy copy and paste. The better the quality, the more accurate the text will be.

Testing: To give this a good test, I used ScanR to scan the same document with my E71, N82, and N75. The E71 is a powerful business phone with a 3.2 megapixel camera with LED flash. The N82 is quite possibly the best camera phone currently available with a 5 megapixel camera and Xenon flash, and the N75 has a somewhat standard 2 megapixel LED flash camera. ScanR "scores" each image on a scale that goes to 120. In my experience, anything over 80 is still better than what you would get from sending through a regular fax machine and is perfectly usable. I have sent documents in the 50s that have worked out, as well, but I prefer higher quality scans if I can get them. In testing, I used a Nokia Warranty Repair instructions sheet I received from them and printed. The N82 was actually done with a recreation because I lost the original, but it is practically the same and was taken in the same location of the house, under the same conditions, as the other images.

The N75 scored a 52 with this document. It is passable, but just barely. If it were a signed contract, it would be okay because it would be identifiable, but as detailed instructions, it takes a bit of work to read them. Small print or handwriting would never work at that low a score. The character recognition was abyssmal with a score this low, and you can only use the image/pdf version of this document.

The E71 scored a 93 with its scan of the document. This is a great image and was taken in good lighting. I doubt it will be a common occurence where you would need to take pictures of documents in low light settings, but if you do, I worry a bit about the E71's flash being up to the challenge. For everyday office-environment scans, however, the image quality plus the business styling of the phone is a winning combination. Also, the text-recognition is very good, with all the text and just a couple strange characters that popped up. You would be well-served using this as an OCR tool.

The N82 scored a 100 with its scan. This is near-perfect and I have taken low-light scans with this camera phone that came out almost as good, due to its superior flash. The text recognition was without errors or strange characters. One downside of scanR is the online interface. It is more than adequate for viewing and sending a particular document. However, there is no management for multiple documents. You cannot delete multiple docs if you would like to clean it up, nor is there any sort of tagging or categorization available, other than the type of image: document, whiteboard, or business card. It is also slow if you are trying to quickly look at documents to determine which one you want to send.

Alternatives: As much as I like it, scanR is not the only game in town. Doing a search recently, I discovered Qipit and Snapter. Qipit appears to be nearly the same as scanR. They offer the ability to scan, convert to pdf and fax documents. They lack the OCR (convert to text) option and the business card scanning, and appear to be a bit more sharing-oriented. To sum them up quickly, I would say that scanR is the better business person's solution, and Qipit is slightly more geared toward students for note-taking and sharing. Qipit is also free for the first 100 documents. Either would work well in each situation, however. Snapter is more of a desktop solution, geared toward cameras, rather than camera phones. Not that it couldn't be used by the latter. It has more of an aim at OCR (converting the images to text) than to the office replacement that scanR and Qipit can be. ...Read more