The other day I was on the radio up here in Canada sharing my tips for the best apps of the week. One of my choices was a new scanning app for iOS and Android called Scanbot.
“Another mobile scanning app?” you might say. Yes, another scanning app, but this one has taken a bit of a novel approach – they are going for pure scanning speed.
As with all scanning apps on DocumentSnap, I took it to my local Starbucks to test it in real world conditions. The fact that it is Earth Day and I received a free coffee doesn’t hurt either.
Quick Capture
If you have used mobile scanning apps in the past, you will be familiar with the need to have your phone positioned just right, then work your finger over to hit the camera button. In the grand scheme of things this is not the world’s biggest problem, but it can occasionally be tricky and is one extra step.
Scanbot attempts to address this by detecting when it is lined up for a good image, and it automatically snaps the picture. If you don’t have the camera quite right, it will tell you to move it closer or adjust the angle. When you have it right – snap!
Like any scanning app, I found this worked best when there is lots of light, and the auto-detection feature worked best when there isn’t any wacky page layout going on.
If it can’t detect the page, not to worry – you can adjust the page borders yourself if you need to.
Cloud Integration
Scanbot can make it easy to upload your scans to the cloud (if you want). You can set it to automatically upload your captures, or it has built-in integration with Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, OneDrive, Box, and Yandex.Disk[1]
Quality
I find the quality of Scanbot pretty good, though not quite up to the level of other apps like Scanner Pro and Genius Scan. Since quality is a subjective thing, here are a few scans that I did at my table at Starbucks.
- Color Magazine image
- Color Magazine article
- Black & White Document (The fact that the paper is all wrinkled is not Scanbot’s fault. It is the only B&W sheet I had. The perils of being paperless.)
- Notebook sketch (The sketch for the first version of DocumentSnap.com!)
In the end, it depends what you are looking for from your app – the fastest capture/upload or the highest quality.
Design and Other Features
I don’t know if it is because I am an evil or unproductive person, but I love and respond well to the color red, so I am probably biased towards Scanbot’s flat red interface.
One cool feature that you don’t see in a lot of mobile scanning apps is annotation. Scanbot has basic annotation abilities to mark up your scan before saving it.
At the time of writing, Scanbot is .99 for iOS and for Android, and is working its way into my rotation of scanning apps.
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I don’t know what that is either. ↩
