There is something a little archaic about business cards. An elegantly designed one can still be minor status symbol if (although you do run the risk of being this guy on YouTube. For the most part they are just little bits of paper that take up space in your wallet or desk drawer when the information they contain really belongs in your phone. This is why we're taking a look at the ABBYY Business Card Reader for your Nokia....
Technology can come to the rescue, though - you can buy little dedicated card scanners that will sit on your desk and let you feed cards into them, but these can be pricey and - more importantly - only really do one thing. Unless you know you will be collecting hundreds of cards you have to wonder if it is worth having yet another lump of plastic taking up space next to your PC.
ABBYY Business Card Reader attempts to solve the problem using something you already have - your Nokia smartphone. The app uses the phone's camera to 'scan' the card and then applies some nifty optical character recognition software to turn that picture into useful text that you can then import into your address book. Sounds good, but how does it work in practice?
Surprisingly well, is the answer. On starting the app you will see a small rectangle in the middle of your phone's screen. When the camera is activated (e.g. by opening the shutter) you need to line up that rectangle along the top edge of business card you wish to scan. In practice, just ensuring that the text you want to read is visible in the viewport is usually sufficient, and ABBYY can cope with the text being slightly skewed.
When you hit the D-pad button, the app will quickly adjust focus to get the crispest image it can and then capture a shot of the card. The character recognition routines then kick in as the app does its best to work out the text on the card and fit it into the correct categories (name, mobile number, address, etc.) to fill out an addressbook entry. These categories are all optional, and if you would prefer that ABBYY never tries to grab (e.g.) email addresses then you can just disable it in the settings.
The interpreted text is displayed with any suspect letters highlighted in red. We found the results to be excellent with only very small or poorly printed text causing real problems. The app does need you to at least attempt to orient the card correctly, though, and will just give you nonsense if you give it a card upside down or on its side. Once you have corrected any scanning errors, or deleted entire fields if it has got really confused, you just hit 'next' and import the new contact into the address book.
All in all, ABBYY Business Card Reader worked extremely well. Although there are other 'scanner' apps available for Nokia phones, ABBYY manages to keep tightly focused on just handling business cards and as such manages to deliver exactly what it promises. If you receive a lot of business cards in your job and would like some way putting them to practical use, we definitely recommend you give this a try.
ABBYY Business Card Reader costs 19.95 Euros and can be downloaded from ABBYY
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