.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Force-feeding business cards to your PalmPilot
.OTHER
.SUMMARY One of the great things about the PalmPilot is you can carry it everywhere. But if you carry it to a tradeshow, there’s no chance you’ll have time to hand-enter everyone’s contact information. Now there’s a solution. In this article, we review the CardScan Plus 300, a device that let’s you scan business cards into your PalmPilot.
.AUTHOR Richard Echeandia
I don’t know about you , but there are times when I have a love/hate relationship with Graffiti. I’m not certain whether its the barometric pressure, the current price of IBM stock or the color of my socks but there seem to be days when Graffiti and I just don’t get along. Its usually on these days, of course , that I need to enter the most information and I end up wishing for a way to force feed words and letters to my PalmPilot. If your experience is like mine then you’ll probably be interested in CardScan Plus 300, a recently updated product from Corex Technologies.
.H1 How is this product supposed to help?
CardScan Plus 300, shown in Figure A, is a hardware and software combination with one purpose in mind: to automate the task of entering business card information into your personal computer. The CardScan product itself has been around for years, but with the recent success of the PalmPilot, Corex has added a HotSync conduit to its contact management software and beefed up its documentation for PalmPilot users.
.FIG A This is how the CardScan Plus 300 looks when connected to your computer.
.H1 What is CardScan Plus 300?
There are two main components to CardScan Plus 300, the scanner hardware and the CardScan Plus 300 contact management/OCR software. Also included in the box are an external AC adapter and a pass-thru parallel printer cable. The CardScan software is supplied on a CD-ROM. A diskette version of the software was not included in the box I received for review but is available from Corex by calling a toll-free number.
Unpacking the box I discovered that the scanner unit is a small gray box approximately 7 inches wide, 6 inches deep and 3 inches tall (17 cm by 15 cm and 7 cm tall), small enough to be unobtrusive on most desktops. The scanner weighs just over 1.5 pounds (725g). Most of the weight in the box came from the external AC adapter. It’s physically smaller than the scanner but tips the scales at just under two pounds. If you’re a road warrior planning on bringing the CardScan Plus 300 with you to trade shows and conferences, your shoulder should budget an additional 5 pounds for schlepping around the hardware.
.H1 Installation/configuration
To begin the review, I installed the PalmPilot Desktop software on a new machine. I performed a HotSync once to verify that the normal PalmPilot conduit was working correctly between my PC and the PalmPilot. I then began to explore the physical connection of the CardScan Plus 300 to my computer. Because the CardScan Plus 300 is connected via the parallel port and I only had one parallel port on my computer, I had to disconnect the other device which was connected there (an external Syquest SparQ drive) and connect the CardScan Plus 300 in its place. The CardScan Plus 300 has a connector on its rear panel for your parallel printer so if you’ve only got one printer port and one printer, it should coexist peacefully with your other hardware. If you have more than one parallel device, you may need to add an additional parallel port to your computer. I went into the System Control Panel, removed the Syquest port driver and began the installation of the CardScan Plus 300 software.
The installation as supplied on the CD-ROM is straightforward and keeps you updated on its progress. For the purposes of the review, I selected the installation option using all of the program’s defaults. Using the popular InstallShield utility, the CardScan Plus 300 software can be easily uninstalled later should you choose to do so.
At one point during the installation, the software prompts you for the serial number of your unit. This serial number is supplied on one of the printed manuals so be careful with your documentation.
Once the installation of the CardScan software is complete, you can configure the device to work with your computer and your PalmPilot. The supplied documentation steps you through the process of selecting which scanner came in the box, which parallel port to use and performing a series of test scans to calibrate the scanner.
To have the CardScan Plus 300 work with the PalmPilot, you execute an additional configuration program called "PalmPilot Conduit Setup". This setup program has only two screens for working with the PalmPilot: one that enables CardScan synchronization, shown in Figure B, and another that determines the type of synchronization, shown in Figure C.
.FIGPAIR B Using the setup program, the CardScan conduit can be disabled to allow for synchronizing with the normal PalmPilot Desktop – a nice touch.
.FIGPAIR C This screen is where the synchronization type is selected.
Once I had completed these screens and restarted the HotSync manager, I was ready to start using the software in conjunction with my Pilot.
.H1 My experience with the CardScan Plus 300
The CardScan contact management software which comes bundled with the scanner is what I would describe as an entry level contact manager. Using the familiar Rolodex metaphor, the system allows you to view contact information either one name at a time or in a tabular listing. The views which list multiple names can only be sorted by contact last name, by company name or by whether or not the address information has been marked as verified. This last view is helpful for performing data cleanup after scanning.
Features which set this software above the average Rolodex-style application include duplicate checking, an integrated phone dialer, multiple contact list merge, launch of the contact’s URL in your default browser and sending E-mail to MAPI compliant E-mail systems based on the E-mail address of the currently selected name. The CardScan contact manager also allows you (not surprisingly) to store the card’s image within the database for later review and recall. Figure D shows the CardScan contact manager application in action.
.FIGPAIR D Other than on the PalmPilot, this is where you’ll enter and maintain address information.
.H1 How well do the scanner and OCR conversion work?
The scanner automatically detects the insertion of a business card into the scanning platform and draws it into the scanning area. The bundled software is designed to operate in batch mode – scan a dozen or so cards then perform the OCR (optical character recognition) conversion. The system would work equally well one card at a time.
The OCR software is stunningly accurate on some portions of the scanned information. Of the 80 cards I scanned and converted, only 2 needed any corrections to the address information or the primary phone numbers. A great deal of attention was obviously spent in this portion of the conversion software. Much to my surprise, some very difficult addresses came in without a hitch. The printed documentation warns users that "CardScan has been optimized for North American business cards. Though it will do an acceptable job with international cards, the results will not be as good as with U.S. and Canadian cards." This was borne out in my testing with Foreign addresses having slightly more problems with postal codes, and city, state and province abbreviations.
By and large, the software seemed excellent at working with a wide range of typefaces and sizes. Some cards which had text too small to comfortably read scanned completely accurately. Italic and bold text also seemed not to confuse the scan engine.
The start to finish speed of the scan is very good for an entry level consumer device. In my tests, most cards scanned in approximately 6 seconds and the OCR conversion took an additional 4 or 5 seconds. Being batch oriented, the scanning system would allow most users to easily scan hundreds of cards in an hour.
Normal types of errors (upside-down cards, off-angle printing) are all handled automatically by the scanner software with aplomb. Images are flipped right side up or de-skewed by the scanner without human intervention.
Headings in front of phone numbers are usually applied to the phone number. So, if you’ve got a card with the following types of phone numbers: "Main, Direct, Fax, Mobile or US Tel", the scanner software would place the correct labels in front of the converted information.
.H1 Is the scanning system perfect?
In a word, no – but it is very, very good. The CardScan Plus 300 never missed the mark completely but it was also very rare for the system to get everything completely correct. Out of the 80 cards which I scanned, only 3 of them required no modifications to the converted data. On average each card needed 1 or 2 simple edits. Most of the errors which I saw were in the company name or contact name fields. Since company names are one of the things that tend to be most graphical and have the greatest variety of fonts and presentations, this shouldn’t be surprising.
There were also problems sometimes with phone numbers going into the wrong fields: those reserved for email addresses and URLs. The system seemed to occasionally confuse the URL for a company with the contact’s email address. Given that URLs almost always begin with the ubiquitous www and that the software allows you to launch your browser to the contact’s URL, I would hope that Corex could improve the functioning in this area of the translation. Only if the URL on a business card was preceded with "http://" did it scan in correctly and was placed in an additional field below the contact’s email address.
.H1 Interfacing with Pilot Desktop
What’s in it for you as a PalmPilot user? The CardScan Plus 300 system only interfaces to one portion of the PalmPilot, the Address Book application, but it does that pretty well. The developers of the CardScan obviously worked with PalmPilot users to understand the many ways in which the PalmPilot is used with address information. The online documentation contained the following five different scenarios for using the CardScan Plus 300 with a PalmPilot:
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET One-way synchronization
.BULLET Two-way synchronization
.BULLET Performing a HotSync with multiple PalmPilot organizers with one computer
.BULLET Performing a HotSync with one PalmPilot organizer with multiple computers
.BULLET Performing a HotSync with CardScan Plus 300 with PalmPilot, then synchronizing with another contact manager
.END_LIST
Some of these scenarios are difficult using the normal 3Com conduit software so this is a clear value add for the CardScan Plus 300. After scanning and converting my business cards into the CardScan application I was ready to HotSync them over to my PalmPilot. Unfortunately, that is where I had my only real trouble doing this review.
.H1 Performing a HotSync with the CardScan Plus 300
During the installation of the CardScan Plus 300, I had selected two-way synchronization because my PalmPilot already had address information in it. My first HotSync with the CardScan Plus 300 completely moved all of the newly scanned information to the PalmPilot without a hitch. The existing information on the PalmPilot did not make it back down to the CardScan software however.
I checked and rechecked my settings, edited some data on both the PC and the PalmPilot and did another HotSync . Still no luck. I placed two tech support calls to Corex (more on that later) and was finally contacted by a very friendly and knowledgeable technician from their support group later that afternoon. After verifying installation and setup information, she determined that the problem was that my CardScan datafile and HotSync user information both had the same name, in this instance my name. Once I changed the name of the CardScan database name and updated the name of the database to HotSync with, everything worked correctly. Should you get a CardScan Plus 300 for yourself be sure that you use a different name for the contact manager database then your HotSync user name.
After I fixed this problem, the HotSync process seemed normal in every regard. Unlike some other third party conduits, the CardScan conduit seemed every bit as fast as the 3Com Address conduit and worked just as reliably.
The only other problem that I ran into while doing a HotSync to the PalmPilot was with phone number types. As with the PalmPilot, the CardScan software allows you to select from a drop down list for each phone number to display what kind of phone number it is. Some of the available choices in the CardScan have no comparable value in the PalmPilot world, the most notable being "Direct". If a phone number within CardScan is selected as "Direct", it will display on the PalmPilot in one of the Category fields the next time a HotSync is performed. This is a problem on the PalmPilot because the phone number is available for display in the sorted list. To correct this behavior I edited the new names to remove the "Direct" designation. The phone numbers then displayed correctly after the next HotSync.
.H1 Support
Other than the file naming hitch which I mentioned above, most users shouldn’t have a problem with this package. [Although our managing editor had a data loss experience with an older unit after a HotSync. Be sure to doubly back up your data before using. –DG] The system is easy to use and extremely well documented. If you do have to contact Corex for technical support though, you might have to wait a while. I’ve only had to contact Corex twice for support. Phone calls to the support line are toll calls (not 800 or 888 calls) to the 617 area code. The first call I made resulted in a wait time of 20 minutes after which I hung up. The second contact which I made was via email. At the time of this writing, the email message still has not been replied to after five days. A representative of Corex stated that wait times of this duration were unusual and that she would make a note of it for the technical support manager.
.H1 Conclusion
Would I spend my money on one? Well now, that depends. I’m a computer consultant, not a traveling salesman. In a normal week, I usually don’t get more than three or four names to enter into the PalmPilot. This level of need seems below what the CardScan Plus 300 is intended for. When its time for me to attend a conference and collect dozens of business cards, then I’d absolutely want to have a CardScan Plus 300 with me. If I were managing an office with many PalmPilot users the CardScan Plus 300 would definitely have a place in my automation arsenal.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
CardScan Plus 300 is available at most office supply stores, and at Corex Technologies at http://www.corex.com
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO Richard Echeandia is a Principal with Tactica Technology Group, a national technology consulting firm located in Dallas, Texas. He is happily married with 2 kids, 2 dogs and 2 PalmPilots. He can be reached online at richard.echeandia@tacticatech.com.
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