SamCard automatically adds a contact by scanning their business card [iPhone]

SamCard is a new business card scanner/reader for the iPhone. The purpose of the app is simply to skip the step of entering a contact into your phone after receiving their business card. Or if entering cards takes up too much time normally, you won’t have to carry around a bunch of disheveled business cards that are probably in no particular order. The technology is quite ingenious and can save a user a great deal of time and effort, especially at work.

SamCard is quite straightforward in terms of scanning cards. All you need to do is take a picture of the card, making sure that you fit the card as snugly inside the provided barrier lines as possible. The developer suggests taking a photo in a well lit area. You will probably notice right away that SamCard utilizes an anti-shake technology that makes it quite easy to take the photo.

Once the photo is taken of your card, SamCard will use a type OCR scanning technology to grab all the relevant information from the card and place it into the typical categories from your contact list (i.e. name, phone number, address, etc.). I suggest that users play around with this, because the first time I scanned, the resulting contact data was pretty bad. My initial reaction was that the app was terrible, but after paying more attention to the quality of the photo the second time, I realized that my photography was the problem. My estimate is that 95% of the scanned results were accurate and SamCard allows you to edit each item that isn’t before it is added to your contacts.

Price: $3.99

Version discovered: 1.5