QuickAdvice: Scan Business Cards Into Your iPhone’s Contacts With CamCard - Plus Win a Promo Code!
CamCard(Business Card Reader) ($6.99) by IntSig Information Co.,Ltd eliminates the need to hold on to other people’s business cards. With CamCard you can quickly and easily move the information from a card to your contacts. There are plenty of business card scanners out there, but this one is easy to use, has nice features, and has a free lite version so you can try it risk-free. Read on to learn more.
Select “Take Picture” (or “Select Picture”, if you already took a picture of the card and stored it on your camera roll). Ideally you’ll use the iPhone 3GS or 4, but you can also use an earlier model iPhone if you have the Griffin Clarifi or something to enhance the photo.
Snap (or select) a photo of the card. The app will automatically rotate and enhance the photo, glean the contact information, and show you the information in fields. At that point you can edit the information if it’s not correct. I found the accuracy to be pretty good, but not flawless. Check carefully before going to the next step. For example, I found with doctors, the app mistakes the “MD” or the “DDS” for the doctor’s last name. Also, a clean and simple business card works best. This is a major caveat for this app, as well as other business card scanner apps I have tried: an information-dense business card simply will not save accurately and you’ll have to make corrections or enter many of the fields by hand. At this point, you can tap “Group” to place this contact into a particular group in your address book. Also, you can select “Merge with existing Contact” if you like.
Tap “Save to iPhone Contact”. That’s it!
You also get a “Card Holder”, which saves the actual pictures of the business cards so you have your entire collection in one place.
CamCard comes in several different versions - one just for English and other Western Languages, and another that reads English PLUS Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. There is a free lite version of each. With the lite version, you can save up to three contacts per week. I would recommend trying out the lite version if you’re not scanning a lot of business cards, or if you just want to try it out before laying out the cash.
Is CamCard perfect? No. But it does a decent job, and certainly makes it easier to transfer information from the business cards that you collect into your iPhone’s contacts.
Would you like to win a copy? We have 7 promo codes to give away for the more expensive version: it reads English as well as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. It is automatically set to English, so you can use it just like the regular English version. Simply comment below or retweet for your chance to win. Contest ends Sunday, October 10 at 12:00 p.m. EDT.
