INTRODUCTION

    One important facet of any Personal Digital Assistant, beyond the ability to display information in a meaningful way, is to enable the user to capture information in the simplest and quickest way possible. Voice capture and quick note-taking has been the focus productivity applications for some time now but the ability to capture information using visual recognition through the devices camera is a relatively new idea. A Chinese company, Penpower Technologies, is making headway into this market with a range of business card reading software. One of their offerings is WorldCard Mobile which attempts to translate a photo of any business card into a new contact record and assign the information to the correct fields. Is this a realistic and useful new way to record information quickly, or is it stretching the ability of what we can expect mobile devices to do? Read on to find out!

WHAT’S HOT

    Here’s what is unique about WorldCard Mobile:

• Simple graphical interface
• Integrates with built in camera software
• Allows manual data selection from image
• Built-in Help files
• Multilingual field recognition

SETUP

   WorldCard Mobile can be installed from your PC using a setup file via ActiveSync or using a CAB file directly on your device. Your device must be Windows Mobile 5.0 or above and must have camera capability.

PRODUCT FEATURES

   Once installed, the application can be found in your Programs folder.

The main control screen has a simple layout with a single, thumb-sized activation button. From here you can also check your version details.

The other buttons give access to the help file and allow you to select the operating language for WorldCard Mobile.

    Activating WorldCard Mobile transfers you to a camera view screen so you can frame your business card and capture the image using your standard image capture button. If you are not happy with the image, you can re-take the photograph as many times as you need until you are satisfied with the quality.

    When you accept the image, you are taken to the card preparation screen where you can make changes to how the application handles the card details. Here you can rotate the image left or right to accommodate vertically presented cards. At this stage you can still choose to re-capture the card too.

If you wish, at this stage you can manually select information form the card and assign it to fields of your own choice.

You can zoom in to allow easier selection of information when smaller text has been used.

Drop-down selections allow you to change the language that WorldCard Mobile should interpret form the card. You can also change the region that the information applies to.

    When you ask WorldCard Mobile to recognise the card information, it will read the field data and cross match it to pre-defined field labels in its own list. You can still modify this information and cut, copy and paste it between fields.

    If you are not happy with the way WorldCard Mobile has interpreted the data then you can click the browse button and again manually select data from the image and assign it to the fields of your choice.

    Buttons at the bottom of the field window allow you to choose which data is included in the contact record. As well as adding fields not recognised from the card, you can optionally remove ones that you don’t want.

You can change each field label against the captured information to correct the contact record. The image view window can also be removed to increase the size of the field list view.

Once you are happy with the record details, pressing the export button will transfer all the data to a new contact record.