Occasionally, we get to test some pretty suave iPhone apps. We think the ideal iPhone app should:
- Firstly (and most importantly) be super cool
- Save you time
- Be well priced
- Be easy to use
It looks like the developers of the 2 apps we have on test today have similar priorities. We’d like to introduce you to WorldCard Mobile & WorldCard Contacts. These 2 apps tag-team together to produce some pretty clever functionality for business men and women worldwide. In fact, the 2 apps suit just about any user who ever needs to store contact details – but dislikes manually punching out the particulars.
WorldCard Mobile for iPhone
Say goodbye to manually entering contact details for good. All you need is the WorldCard application and a business card and you’re off. Simply take a picture of the card, and WorldCard Mobile uses some clever image detection to pull out the contact details and then offer the ability to save these to your iPhone contact list. Unlike some text recognition we’ve tried before, WorldCard is very accurate. The makers recommend using WorldCard Mobile with the iPhone 3GS as this has a slightly updated and better spec camera. When we tested it out – the app worked almost 100% of the time. What a life saver if you have a pile of cards from a networking meeting…
Features
- Multilingual Display
WorldCard Mobile provides display interfaces in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and English. - Multilingual Recognition
Capable of recognizing business cards in simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and English. - Automatic Recognition of Information
Automatically sorts recognized information by name, position, company, phone number, fax number, address, or other fields. - Business Card Management
Edit and sort business card information for effective management. - Export to Contact
Export information to your contact book efficiently.
Price & Availability
You can purchase WorldCard Mobile from the App Store for a pocket-friendly $5.99!
Test
Here’s how it works. Simply boot up WorldCard Mobile and hit camera. The camera will load, and you can line-up your business card, then focus the image. Obviously the better the picture, the better the final result. We like to test stuff like this so the image above has a little blur, some extra elements and is a touch off focus (all intentional of course).
Once you take the picture, you have the option to re-take or use that image.
The image on the left shows the settings pane for recognition. This allows you to set the language & orientation of your card. The bottom right corner icon takes you back to the camera, in case you’ve had second thoughts.
The image on the right shows just what a brilliant job the app does. It’s detected my email, name and services offered (interpreted correctly as “work”). This is pretty clever stuff. You’ll see the reference relating to the highlight element at the bottom of the screen, which is handy if you’ve wondered just where something came from exactly. The process takes a few seconds.
Then simply export the file and the name will appear in your contact list.
WorldCard Contacts
Now for the ultimate bit of integration. WorldCard Mobile is essentially a stand-alone app, at least it can be used in this way. However, if you go ahead and purchase it’s partner app, WorldCard Contacts – you can gain access to a whole host of new, useful features.
Features
1.Easily create contact groups, to quickly sort and find contacts (work / family / school / clients / etc)
2.View contacts in either “List Mode” (Similar to the native contact list, except with added photo and company information) or Card Mode (Scroll through your business card book with full card images). All with a quick search function to pinpoint the contact you need rapidly.
3.Make a call, send a text message or email, browse to the company’s website, and pinpoint them on a map with simple one button access.
4.Works just like the native contacts application from the iPhone including favorites, recent calls, and keypad access.
5.Integrates with the WorldCard Mobile App (sold separately) to let you easily entering contacts via capturing and recognizing business card photos. No more manually entering contacts needed.
Integration between the two is seamless. WorldCard Contacts is able to seemingly open up Mobile within it’s own workspace, never actually appearing to boot the app from scratch
.
So we start in Contacts by taking a pic and selecting the language of recognition.
We hit recognize and WorldCard does it brilliant job of working out the information on our card
Then we save the card into our WorldCard contacts app. This works great, and looks pretty cool. When you select an individual contact, you have the following options:
You can phone, email, text, view the web site and location of the person in question. You can also crop the image if you like.
Price & Availability
You can purchase WorldCard Contacts from the App Store for an even more pocket-friendly $1.99!
Conclusion
2 fantastic apps that do what they say on the tin. Brilliant, functionality is clever and reliable – a real time saver!