This review is also featured at G Style Magazine which is a tech blog that focuses on the fashion aspect of tech. Please visit their site as well for more articles.

Here at The Gamer With Kids, we review a lot of iPhone games and portable games but once in a while we like reviewing apps that are just plain useful for every day life. We all have normal jobs here to support our families so when an app comes around that helps us get our work done even faster, well I’m always happy to check them out and throw my two cents in.

Today we are going to take a look at Penpower’s WorldCard Mobile for the iPhone. The app can also be used on the iPod Touch but it’s only partially useful on the iPad since it doesn’t have a camera. WorldCard Mobile is a text recognition app whose main function is to transfer data from a business card into your contacts app. It’s supposed to recognize information on the card such as the person’s name, company, position, telephone numbers and address. It also can convert data from email signatures and add that as well. Does it work? Read on to find out.

Short answer for those who are short on time is yes, it works and it works very well. I tested WorldCard Mobile on a few different cards I had sitting in my cardholder at work. I tried a few really simple cards as well as some more complex looking cards. Every card I tried it correctly inputted all the information into the proper fields and all the information was spot on.

WorldCard Mobile also has the convenient feature of being able to import signature information from your emails and then export them out into your contacts app. This saves a lot of time considering I used to have to switch back and forth from my email to my contacts just to type all the information in. With WorldCard Mobile, it’s only a 4 step process that takes less than a minute.

The only downside to this app is that it doesn’t recognize certain foreign cards. I have a few cards that are in Chinese and it doesn’t recognize the Chinese characters. It’s not that big of a deal as it still picks up all the numerical data, address, and email and website data so that still saves you some time. It also has a hard time picking up certain words if there is an image behind it if it blends in too much with it. It does however recognize Spanish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese.

If you use your iPhone for business, I highly recommend this app. I get a lot of business cards weekly and sometimes it’s a real pain for me to have to type in all that information sometimes. With WorldCard Mobile, it literally only takes a few clicks here and there to get all that information into your contacts app.

WorldCard Mobile is available now in the App Store for $5.99. Obviously the app works best with a camera equipped iOS device however you can still use it on your iPad to import email signature information.

Rating: A

Description

** First iOS 4.0/iPhone 4 supported business card reader **

***** What’s New In This Version *****
1. Automatic Camera Shake Reduction
2. Email Signature Capture
3. Improvement of Recognition Accuracy
4. Integrates with the WorldCard Contacts(sold separately)to make a call, send a text message or email, browse to the company website directly from their business cards image.

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Take a picture. Add a contact. Get done with your iPhone/iPod Touch contact list. That’s it!

*No manual entries.
*No typos.
*No confusion in contacts.

Place a business card in a well-lit region. Focus your iPhone camera at it and just click and then, use. WorldCard Mobile’s leading business recognition system gets things done at high-speed.

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Why WorldCard Mobile?
*Superior recognition quality
*High-speed scanning & update
*Automatic camera shake reduction
*Automatic sorting of contact data
*Automatic merging of data into existing contacts
*Auto-image rotation when scanned sideways
*Manual cropping by finger when recognition happens partially
*Ability to differentiate business cards from saved images
*Email signature capture function

Recognition of 7 languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch). Not many apps have this feature. You can switch from one language to another just like that!

***** Compatibility Notes *****
*Fast, Accurate Business Card Reader for iPhone 4, 3GS.
* Not recommended for iPhone 3G due to the camera’s inability to auto-focus.
* Works on the iPad and iPod Touch by uploading business cards from the photo library.

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How to improve recognition?
1. Place the business card on a flat surface, in a well-lit area
2. Hold the iPhone in the correct position, camera focused on the card, right above it
3. When you’ve fixed focus on the card, hold the phone firmly & click
4. Check the results for recognition
5. Crop manually for re-do of recognition

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WorldCard Contacts – Actual cards in your contact list!
WorldCard Contacts app is the close kin of WorldCard Mobile Business Reader. If you want the actual business card images to be saved alongside your contacts, you can get it done with WorldCard Contacts app. With it, you get to browse cards in smarter ways, make custom groups and create interactive directories and also, make phone calls/send SMS/ search maps directl.
WorldCard Mobile + WorldCard Contacts – Work wonders!
WorldCard Mobile uses OCR technology to save info (from cards) as searchable texts in the language of your choice under the card’s image. WorldCard Contacts allows you to store actual business card images alongside your contacts.
If you have both together, you can unlock the best of both and enjoy some great additional features. To use the OCR from WorldCard Mobile inside WorldCard Contacts, tap the WorldCard Contacts icon, take a card image and choose your desired language recognition to save this card info with image and text. WorldCard Mobile syncs with WorldCard Contacts to extract, store and place the card’s info into an interactive directory!

[via App Store]

This review is also featured at G Style Magazine which is a tech blog that focuses on the fashion aspect of tech. Please visit their site as well for more articles.