Author: Terry White

Manually entering your contacts from all the business cards you receive is bad enough. However, trying to enter these manually via your iPhone makes it even more difficult. This is why when someone hands me a business card, I nod and thank them, but that card will only be in my possession long enough to scan it in directly via my iPhone. I’ve reviewed various Business Card Scanner Apps in the past and I would have to say that WorldCard Mobile has the most options for any that I’ve seen. It does the basics that we would all expect. It allows you to take a picture of the card with your iPhone camera and then it will OCR (optical character recognize) your card converting the picture into text and intelligently putting the information into the correct fields. The 1st card I tried was my own business card and the App got everything right except that it missed the T on my first name. That of course was an easy correction and with a couple of taps the entry was complete. I was very impressed to also see that they not only allow you to add the card to your iPhone contacts or just keep it in the App, but they even allow you to choose which Group you want to put it in on your iPhone’s contacts. That’s a 1st. I’ve not seen any other Apps to date that let you do that. Another nice feature that I hadn’t seen on the other Business Card Readers is the ability to scan QR Codes. QR codes typically take you to a website. However, there are QR codes that contain vCards or basically business cards. This kind of entry is the BEST as there would be no need to do any OCR. It also supports 16 languages, selective/partial recognition, Google Contact Sync, and a very nice ability to copy an email signature and convert that data into a contact <-slick.

Sounds good, but…

This App does a great job at what it’s designed to do, but there are some things I’d like to see in the next version. First and foremost is an update that gives us full iPhone 5 screen size support. While there is the ability to share a contact from the App via email, I’d like to see some additional sharing options such as via the Messages app. The App allows you to Add a photo to the contact just like the built-in Contacts App does. However, it also shows a picture of the card you scanned next to that photo. I’d like to see the option of making the business card image the default photo for the contact if you don’t choose or take one. Lastly a batch capture option would be nice. It would also be nice to see this as a Universal App for both iPhone and iPad. Since we often get more than one card when we attend meetings and conferences, it would be nice to be able to snap all the cards in one session and then have the App do all the recognition in the background. Lastly all you would need to do is proof them before recycling the physical cards.

Overall this is definitely one of the “BEST” Business Card Managers for iOS that I’ve seen.