One of the great things about the iPhone is the capabilities that it opens to you that really didn’t exist before. Before the iPhone came along, who could have imagined that one day, we’d scan bar codes of an item in a store and compare prices, get reviews, and even purchase the item online? Now, such ideas are mainstream. With SmartScanner for iPhone, Shape Services attempts to do the same for scanning documents and recognizing text in them while on the go.
SmartScanner for iPhone takes a unique approach to the concept of scanning text. The developers realized that people would want to scan different types of text for different purposes: Scan an entire document (as has been done for years with traditional flatbed scanners), scan a portion of a document (an interesting snippet of an article, perhaps), or scanning a small item such as a phone number or address. The application intelligently allows the user to choose what they wish to scan with an elegant user interface that, however, is not without its problems.
As you aim the camera at a document, SmartScanner automatically detects text on the page and begins to highlight it in real time. To choose an entire highlighted segment, you merely tap on it, and SmartScanner will begin to process the selection. If you want a smaller portion of that text, dragging around that text will highlight it in red and select just that portion. If you want the entire document, you merely tap on the blue scanner icon at the bottom of the screen. The text you selected is then recognized as text and presented on a text screen, from which you can choose to edit the text, copy it to the clipboard, or email it.
The issue that I found with this method is that tapping on the screen while holding the iPhone naturally introduces subtle movement to the device – which has the unfortunate effect of shaking the camera, thereby blurring the image that SmartScanner will use. Despite numerous attempts in different lighting conditions and with different documents in different locations, I was never able to get text that did not require major editing while using the tap-to-select methods. I had much greater success with the full-document method – primarily, I believe, due to the fact that the application waits for the image to stabilize (i.e. waiting for you to steady the iPhone after you tap the icon) before it takes the snapshot that it uses to recognize the text. The text above was produced using just that method. While you are supposed to be able to tap on a phone number and dial it, or a URL and surf to it, the one time I got either of them to recognize, the URL was recognized with typos that would have had me go to the wrong web site. I found myself wishing that Shape Services had used the same steadying procedure with tapped text as it did with the full-page scanned text.
So, despite great promise, I cannot at this time recommend this app.
SmartScanner for iPhone is $1.99 in the App Store.
Shape Services provided a promo code to Just Another iPhone Blog for review purposes. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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