I try to keep as little paper around as possible. Paper piles up and becomes messy very quickly for me and you can’t always carry all your paper with you everywhere – i.e. then I find myself in a situation where I need a document that I don’t have. Most of the documents that I need to access on a regular basis are stored in my Microsoft SkyDrive account. But despite most documents I need being available online these days, I’ve still seem to collect a massive amount of paper on a weekly basis. I started looking for a solution to this and came up with the Handyscan app. Handyscan, developed by JDB Pocketware for Windows Phone 7, enables you to scan documents using the camera on your Windows Phone 7 and then save or share your image or document in multiple ways.
The app is designed in a very simple and clean manner. Once you run the app and tap ”Scan”, the app gives you a few tips for how to have the best scan - you can check the “Don’t show again” in the lower left-hand corner if you just want to go straight to scanning. I have it set to still display, so I click “Start” to begin my scan.
Hold your phone above what you’d like to scan and Handyscan provides a 3 second count down before scanning.
Once it’s scanned your image or document, you then use the selection handles to select as closely to your scanned image or document as possible – i.e. I wanted to try not to show the carpet in the final image. (Note – I scanned one of my business cards on a bit of an angle, which made it trickier to select, but I was still able to get pretty close as the selection tool can be dragged at any angle – i.e. you aren’t limited to a square or rectangle selection). Once you’ve selected your image or document the way you like, tap the “Check” to continue.
On the following screen, Handyscan presents you with three optimization options. I’ve found that that my final scans tend to be slightly darker that I’d expect, so I pick an optimization that is one brighter than what I want. In this example, I chose the top choice by tapping the “Check” to the right of the first choice.
Once you have selected your optimization, you have several options for saving or sharing. This is also the screen where you could add additional pages/images by scanning again. You can save simply to your phone, upload to a cloud service – both SkyDrive and Dropbox are supported - or send your scan to someone by email. I linked my SkyDrive account to Handyscan so it defaults to saving it there when I tap “upload to cloud”.
Uploading to the cloud services of SkyDrive or Dropbox is simple. You have the option to pick your file dimensions (Small, Moderate, or Original) and your image quality (Draft, Fair, Good, or Best). The larger the dimensions you select and/or the better the image quality you choose, the larger the size of your file. You can also choose whether you want to save your scan as an image (JPG) or a document (PDF). Once you have made your selections, tap the Cloud image at the bottom of the screen.
Finally, you are directed to give your image a file name. When you tap “Ok”, your image is automatically uploaded to your cloud service – in my case – SkyDrive. Your image or document is now available in your cloud service!
App Details
Name of App: Handyscan
Published by: JDB Pocketware
Platform: Windows Phone
Cost: There is a free version and a paid version. The paid version is only 99 cents and is well worth it as it offers PDF conversion, emailing options, and the ability to restore backups!
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