WorldCard Mobile iPhone Business Card Scanner Review

Business cards are a part of business life as are stuffy boardroom meetings, tie’s designed to give you that precise level of uncomfort that’s just about bearable and not to mention the posturing of who has the best finished business card (see the remake of American Psycho’s business card comparison scene.)

Ultimately business cards often fade, get discarded, placed into the backside pocket never to be seen again and often become an inconvnient hassle just to enter all that information onto your iPhone. Enter the WorldCard Mobile iPhone App, designed to take all that information and scan it into your iPhone with ease.

I like to pull an app out and jump right in to see what it can do and thankfully Worldcard help with getting going but not so much it get’s in the way.  Cards can be captured either by taking a phone, using a pre taken photo or with the most effective method, turning on stabilisation. All you have to do is then hold the iPhone still and when the targeting window turns green it’s snaps a picture.  Most people will know how tricky pressing that camera button without causing a loss of focus can be.

Most will just scan all information on a card but you can pick out areas or certain bits of information you may want before you head into the recognition phase.

In the office we get a lot of apps passed our way proclaiming bold statements such as “easy”, “fast” and “save time” amongst the buzzwords sent in press releases. WorldCard Mobile delivers on any claims made on their product promo page on the App store.  This is seriously fast, so much so that before the scanner animations have barely begun it’s recognised text.  This happened not just once but consistently across any card we threw at it.

Recognition Accuracy.

Scanning things fast is all well and good but unless final results are accurate or need a minimal amount of editing then that all counts for nothing.   Accuracy it’s not missed a beat with the samples I threw at it.  Raised surfaces, cards with images, different fonts, spacing, layouts everything was taken in it’s stride.  Of course if text isn’t clear to the human eye in the first place expect scanning to struggle just as humans would.

Initially there were sighs at the app for putting brackets ( ) around the area code but that’s just to let you know it’s detected an area code. After exporting those brackets are removed into iPhone contact.  International dialling codes are recognised just fine providing there’s a + sign.

Got a business card with work, mobile and fax numbers?  Yes, somehow WorldCard Mobile knows how to assign those to the relevant contact details on the contacts.

There was only one card it had issues with during testing and that was only because it was black text on a dark background and was hard to read anyways.  So you can be pretty confident it’ll work 99.9% of the time.  Again a touch of common sense is needed when scanning cards.  Nicely lit area’s help along things nicely.

Email signatures.

Again another pain in the backside for putting email signaure information into your contracts, especially if you want to do it on your iOS device.  To get those details from an email signature assigned to a contact simply copy the signature, paste into the signature area you’ll get to from the front screen, paste, click recognise and viola.  Once again a new contact is created with all relevant fields assigned to that contact.

Sharing

Getting information onto your phone is just the first step. What about if you want to share, backup or something else? WorldCard Mobile iPhone App has you covered featuring;

• Exchange contact data through Open In, Mail and iTunes File Sharing. Import/export or backup your data on Mac/Windows quickly and conveniently.
• Share or backup your contacts via cloud services (iCloud / Dropbox). Manage your contacts on all devices, such as Mac PC/Windows PC/Android phone/WP7 phone.

Overall

Worldcard mobile is fast, accurate, integrates information without fuss into your contacts and is an easy purchase decision for deciding on what iPhone business scanning app to choose.

Some confusion did initially arise during recognition, as I said earlier putting brackets around area codes is just a visual indicator to show it had picked up the area code but formats things nicely for contacts.  A touch confusing perhaps.  Another quibble is using the word export. That says to me put it somewhere else or “export” into a different format or app.  Save or another option just to clairfy this would be welcomed. That being said help covers all areas nicely.

In a world of 99p apps, £4.99 might seem like an outlay but if you value your time, want to save yourself from the tediousness of copying multiple fields of information and basically purchase an app that delivers you’ll find WorldCard Mobile iPhone Business Card Scanner delivers nicely on it’s proclamations.

You can find WorldCard Mobile iPhone at the iTunes Store