If you are a businessman or PR responsible for your company, or even a person who loves to make connections with new people, then exchanging (business) cards appears to be a quite normal procedure. But, over the time number of collected cards can become enormous and you may find yourself in trouble how to organize your business cards.
It is clear that having a smartphone is not only “Calling” and “SMS-ing” nor “Liking” and “Chating”, but there are much more benefits. And everybody knows that. For example, having tons of free apps on the Internet is the right way how to transform your smartphone into Super-Gadget!
Thus, why not to use your phone to digitalize and organize all your biz cards?
There are plenty downloadable apps for this purpose: some of them work offline, some of them require Internet connection, and some require registering first.
Dilemma is which one to choose?
In this article we are reviewing 3 apps specifically designed for Android phones and which do not require Internet connection for basic operations i.e. they work offline. Good thing is that OCR
(Optical Character Recognition) happens on the phone.
We did the reading on ten business cards with each one of following apps:
1. CamCard Lite:
We used the free versions only to evaluate the range of capabilities of the mentioned apps.
And here are the results:
| CamCard Lite | ScanBizCards Lite | WorldCard Mobile Lite | |
| Scanning quality | Excellent , with minor errors when extracts address | Very good, sometimes with minor errors | Very good with minor errors |
| Batch mode scanning | Yes | No | No |
| Trimming the card | Automatic | Manual | Automatic |
| Card holder (Groups/Folders) | Yes, with password protection | Yes | Yes |
| Backup/Restore | Yes/Yes | Yes/ No | Yes/No |
| Scanning languages | English, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish | English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese | English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese |
| Works offline | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Option to register online for more features | Yes | Yes | No |
| Required Android version | 2.0 and up | 2.2 and up | 2.0 and up |
| Operations: | Sharing contact information via SMS, Email, QR CodeExport contacts to vCard or Excel filesPersonal Notes for each card
Manage and sync cards across multiple devices
Merge with existing contacts
Supports double-side cards |
Sharing contact information via SMS, EmailExport contacts to LikedIn, Salesforce, SugarCRM etc.Personal Notes for each card
Supports double-side cards |
Sharing contact information (SMS)Export contacts to Phone contacts, vCard, Google or Exchange contactsIntegration with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
Creating contacts from email signature |
| Limitations in Lite version | save 20 cards in the first week, and two more per week afterwards | Add 2 contacts per week | You can only save 50 cards in card holder after recognition |
| Miscellaneous | Create CamCard account to experience more advanced cloud service | Register online to explore more features using Web Sync option (backup cards online) | / |
For detailed and most updated information for each one of these apps, you can always visit their home page either on Google Play or on their website.
General recommendation: During the reading process make sure there is enough day-light in the room or use lamp. In both cases be sure there are no shadows over the cards.
Conclusion: CamCard Lite is currently app with richest set of features and highest ratings from the users. Having the PRO version with all mentioned features for a symbolic price just worth’s it.
We believe that after reading this article you’ll be able to make right choice and get the most appropriate one!
