I think we can all agree that faxing is a disaster. It’s one of those activities that no one wants to do, but we all have to do it once in a while.
I was contacted by the fine folks at Grizzly Labs, makers one one of my favorite scanning apps Genius Scan, and they let me know that they have a brand new app for the iPhone and iPad called Genius Fax.
Their timing was impeccable because the day after I received the e-mail, I had a situation where I had to send a fax to our friendly Canadian version of the IRS.[1]
Credit Where Credit Is Due
The Genius Fax app is free, but to send faxes you need to buy credits in the app. If you want to send just one page it is .99 US, and there are volume discounts that can bring it down to .60/page Updated 04/17/2014: it is now .40/page if you buy blocks of 50. Either way, it beats driving to Staples.
The authors hooked me up with a few credits to try it out, but I’ll be topping up when I run out.
Send From The Cloud Or Your Device
A great feature of Genius Fax is that it can integrate with Box.com, Dropbox, or Google Drive. The document that I wanted to send was in my Dropbox account, so I was able to navigate through my folder hierarchy and select it.
You can also use the standard iOS “Open In…” functionality to open a PDF in Genius Fax if you don’t use any of those built-in cloud services.
Fill Out The Details
Once you’ve chosen your file to send, you then enter who you want it to go to (it can use your Contacts – nice touch), and you have the option of creating a very basic cover page. The cover page doesn’t count towards your Credits, thankfully.
Another nice thing is that the cover doesn’t have any Genius Fax branding or anything like that. It is a clean, basic cover page that you can preview before sending.
Send The Fax
Once you hit Send, you can follow the progress of the fax. One minor interface confusion. There is an icon in the top-right that looks to me like it would be Refresh (i.e., make sure that you are seeing the latest status) but it is actually Resend, if for whatever reason you need to resend the fax.
If you want to refresh the status, just pull down like you do in many other apps.
Either way, all my test faxes went through successfully and the quality of the ones that I could check were great.
You can always see a list of the faxes that you have sent and whether they were/were not successful.
As I said before, faxing is not something that I need to do often, but when I do need to send one out, I could definitely see myself using Genius Fax as a quick and easy way to do it.
The app is iPhone and iPad only at the moment. I’m not sure if there will be an Android version. Faxing from your smartphone – craziness.
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Always a pleasure. ↩
