One especially cool type of app for smart phones is the scanner app. Now I’m not talking police scanning or price scanning apps but scanning documents like you would with a copier scanner. Now you may be thinking, when would I ever need to do that? When you’re out of your office or home and need to scan a handwritten note, a business card, a page from a prospect or customer, having a scanner app can be useful. You can always just take a picture, but a scanner app will turn the image into a PDF document. If you travel for work and need to submit expense reports, being able to scan receipts is especially useful.
The process is fairly simple. You open the app and take a picture of the page or whatever you want to scan. Depending on the app, you can set the area you want to scan and the type of the origin, such as is it black and white, color, a receipt or a photo. When you look at the different apps to try, look at what kind of originals it works best on.
Both iphone and Android have scanner apps. For the Android, there are:
For the iphone, I’ve used these three:
- Genius Scan+ – this only has features for black and white and color, but receipts scan well. It has the added benefit of being able to send them to Facebook and Facebook in addition to Dropbox, Google Docs, Evernote or email them.
- JotNot Pro – this app allows you to select the the size of the paper that the scanned document will be. You can also have presets for black and white, color, whiteboards, light text or blackboards. You can email the scanned image, print the page, send to Evernote, Dropbox, Google Docs or fax it for $1.00 through an add-on feature of the app. Some places can only accept faxes due to federal regulations, and this allows you to fax what you need when you don’t have access to a fax. This app allows you to keep the scanned documents in their library and tag the type of scanned images. You can also name the scanned image.
- Scanner Pro – one of the nicest features of this app is that easily allows you to scan multiple pages and then send the scanned images as one document. It has the features of sending the image to Evernote, Dropbox, Google Docs or email it. Scanner Pro also allows faxing.
While I don’t use these apps on a daily basis, its a great app to have when you need it. If you travel for your work, its a must.