PocketScan Is The Ultra-Portable Mobile Scanner You've Been Waiting For
by Joe White
June 20, 2014
One new Kickstarter campaign aims to bring a product to the market that makes scanning documents, pictures, or anything you choose feel "just like painting." Called PocketScan, the product can wirelessly transmit scans over to a mobile device, and it's available to preorder now for a pledge of $99.
Fujitsu's ScanSnap and Doxie's Go and Flip products offer degrees of portable scanning, and apps like Scanbot indeed utilize the iPhone's camera to allow for "on-the-go" document capture, but PocketScan promises the most portable yet fully-featured solution we've seen yet.
Around the size of a large stamp, PocketScan allows users to glide the handheld scanner over a document and have the scanned image appear wirelessly on a desktop computer or mobile device. If the Kickstarter video (embedded below) is anything to go by, the process is near-instantaneous and occurs in realtime as users scan, building up a complete image with each passing second.
Moreover, PocketScan also performs OCR on your scanned document, making the resultant PDF searchable and editable, and it allows users to open their scans in apps like Microsoft Word or Excel. Smart, right?
Over at the Kickstarter Web page, Dacuda -- the folks behind PocketScan -- explain:
It's the fastest scanner at hand and always works. As easy as pressing a button, PocketScan starts the scan. Anything you scan is wirelessly transmitted and instantly displayed on the screen. Scanning feels just like painting. Thanks to its unique design and sophisticated illumination, PocketScan works even in bright sunlight or low-light environments to produce consistent, clear, and high quality results.Here's the aforementioned video: If you can't see the above video, please click this link. PocketScan does come with a word of warning, however: as of this writing, support for the iPhone (iOS 8) is listed as a target goal that will only be unlocked if the project secures more than $250,000 in Kickstarter funding. At the minute, the project has reached its original funding goal of $150,000, but unfortunately this only unlocks support for the Android platform. As such, iPhone owners are left in an awkward position when it comes to backing PocketScan's campaign. It seems that despite this, PocketScan will nevertheless work with Mac and PC computers, as well as with Apple's iPad, but for a truly mobile scanning experience iPhone support is naturally something we want to see from the product. You can back PocketScan for a Kickstarter pledge of $99, and this is $50 off the scanner's ultimate recommended retail price (RRP) of $149. For more information, including the option of supporting the project and preordering a scanner of your own, head over to PocketScan's Kickstarter Web page. Via: BGR [gallery]
