How to use your smartphone as a scanner

French phone maker Wiko has announced plans to enter the Kenyan market as it seeks to establish a footing in Africa.

What you need to know:

  • Thanks to the smartphones and tablet computers, now you have a scanner in your pocket.
  • With appropriate apps, and they are many, you can scan the document and e-mail it.
  • Scanned files should have an appropriate name and be stored in an appropriately tagged folder.

Have you ever been in situation when you urgently needed to e-mail a copy of an important document to someone but you didn’t know how to or you didn’t have the means?

Or you left an important document at home or office and you need someone to get a copy to you in minutes?

Obviously the easiest solution would be to scan a copy of the document and e-mail to the person.

But how many homes or small offices have a scanner?

Thanks to the smartphones and tablet computers, now you have a scanner in your pocket. With appropriate apps, and they are many, you can scan the document and e-mail it.

You can also opt to store the documents on your phone, in the cloud, or on your computer with just a few taps.

If you are in a library and you find an important book with something interesting, and you are not allowed to borrow it, you can scan the section of interest, save on the phone and read later.

There are several good apps that can help you turn your phone or tablet computer into a pocket scanner.

If you’re using iOS and want something simple and inexpensive, JotNot Scanner will get the job done, and it is absolutely free.

You use the app by either snapping a photo of your document or importing it from your photo library, at which point it will attempt to detect the edges of your document.

For best results, you will need to get as close to the document as you can, make sure that it’s lying flat, and ensure that you’re not taking the photo from an excessive angle — as this can cause odd bending and warping of the final scan.

You can move the scanned document to your computer either by e-mailing, using Photo Stream or transfer directly using a USB cable.

Another mostly used scanning app for both the Android and iOS phones is the CamScanner.

Like JotNot, it can e-mail scans in PDF or JPG formats, save scans to your phone’s photo library, and integrate with cloud services like Google Docs, Box.net, Dropbox, and Evernote.

On this app, you can quickly scan, merge, password protect, delete, share, tag, and even upload documents to cloud platforms.

On Android, you can also download and try the Google Drive app. This app can perform some excellent document scanning tricks.

It can export scanned and image-enhanced files as PDFs, and it even recognises text using Google’s systems over the Internet.

This app has the advantages of Google’s cloud storage system, but it’s not necessarily the easiest app to use.

And you need to open your files in a separate app to edit them.

Think about the files as you scan them by tagging them appropriately and archiving them in the proper place with indicative file names.

Scanned files should have an appropriate name and be stored in an appropriately tagged folder.

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This will ensure that you have an easy time retrieving them when you need them.

Apps like Evernote are designed to make this kind of organisation easy for you, so take advantage of it.

With the right mobile apps, you should be able to eliminate some of that paper.

However, none of these JotNot Scanner, CamScanner or other mobile device-based apps are feasible for high volume use.

But if all you need to do is scan a few business cards, pages of a document or receipts every now and again, scanner apps can do the job of a portable document scanner for a fraction of the price.

Sam Wambugu is a monitoring and evaluation specialist. [email protected]