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Normally, I won’t be posting application reviews for the iPhone here on Mobilitysite, but this one is a special case. This one is too cool to only share with iPhoneMVP.com readers. Enjoy!

So, have you ever let a stack of business cards get like this?

Yep, that’s just 1/2 of the business cards I have stacked up around here. I’ve gone to 2-4 trade shows per year for the last 6 years. Every show, I come back and expect to take time to enter in all the cards I gather on that trip. Well, you guessed it, I never do. They pile up and turn into stacks like this. These are from late 2008 and 2009.  I was interested in this software to try to knock this stack down to nothing. When a friend of mine, Wayne Schulz posted about this, I had to give it a try. Gimmick or real? Let’s see.

Dev Notes:

Out of the box works for iPhone 3GS only! See compatibility note below.

Import contact information from business cards directly to your iPhone contacts!

Just take a photo of a business card and a New Contact is added!

Business Card Reader scans and “reads” the picture using ABBYY’s text recognition technology and enters the data into appropriate fields of the iPhone address book.

No more boring manual input of the names, phone numbers, emails and other information from business cards!

Business Card Reader creates complete and accurate contact information on iPhone in a few seconds.
Recognizes English, French, Italian, German and Spanish business cards.

Added Value: In a built-in browser it is possible to make LinkedIn search of a scanned contact and read LinkedIn profile not leaving the program.

Embedded browser uses the same filtering as Safari: if Safari is disabled this app will also turn off the browser.

Business Card Reader is of great value for anyone who communicates with many people in work or personal life. It’s an excellent tool for business professionals, exhibitors at trade shows, exhibitions attendees and sales personnel.

=== Compatibility Note ===

• No special equipment is required for using the app on iPhone 3GS since its camera allows to take photo of good enough quality.
• If you are using iPhone 2G or 3G, you may need additional gadgets to improve photo quality, such as Griffin Clarifi.
• Since iPod Touch doesn’t have built-in camera, it’s possible to recognize business cards only from saved images.

This is what you get when you 1st start the application. Simple and to the point. The About Tab gives some other options to check them out online as well.

You can choose to scan photos taken from the camera previously or take the photo right now. When you decide to take a photo now, you get some tips on how to have the most success with the scanning. My 1st test, I decided to just wing it and do it with some low fluorescent lighting.

Despite the fluorescent lighting and low levels, I positioned the card and gave it a go. After taking the photo, you have a chance to retake if the photo isn’t quite right. The photos you take are also placed into your camera roll. After you tell the software to use that photo, scanning begins. You get a visual indication of the progress too. It only takes a few seconds.

I can’t share details from this business card, but I can tell you that the phone number and email came through just fine, but the contacts name had a little issue. I was able to quickly edit this and create the contact. As you can see, it uses the business card scan as the contacts photo.

Another cool option the software gives is the ability to look the contact up on Linked In. Works great. After the new contact was completed, I checked out my address book and sure enough, Noah Kravitz was there! Very nice.

Not convinced that I didn’t experience beginner’s luck, I decided to try some more. 2nd try was flawless all around. I used outdoor, natural lighting this time around.

Like I said, this one went perfect. No mistakes in anything. Well, there was a “ added to the end of WAGGENER EDSTROM. No big deal imho.

Since this second contact is already in my address book already, I attempted to merge into the existing contact. No problem there.

Wrap Up
Well, how can you beat this. I went 2/2 to get started. Can’t get better than that right? Well, I wanted to make sure. So far, I have scanned 6 cards and all of them have had similar results. I only had to edit 2 cards slightly. For the time it will save me manually entering them all, I can handle an occasional mix-up. Computers aren’t perfect.

The only gotcha I really have here is that you need to make sure you have the card orientation proper. The viewfinder tells you which way to place the card, so unless you ignore that, you should be fine.

Pros:

• Works well.
• Fast.
• Requires no additional equipment.

Cons:

• Cost, expensive for an iPhone App, but worth it.
• Works only with the 3GS unmodified.

This review is part of our 50 app reviews in 50 days series. To check out the others, click here.