WorldCard Mobile iPhone App Review

You are a high profile business person who’s wallet full of business cards is sky high with high profile contacts yet despite this, you are all about saving the trees and you think paper form business cards are so last year. So what to do? Well, you could grab your camera and take a picture of each business card for future reference, upload it to your PC and name the file as applicable, however this would take a LONG time, so how does an iPhone app sound that makes this process far more efficient? Read on to find out our verdict on what the winner of the 2010 MOBI Award ‘Best Mobile App OCR’ is really like.

App Introduction

WorldCard Mobile is the world’s leading business card scanning app which uses optical character recognition to accurately take data from business cards, thus transferring information to your smartphone and integrating it with your contacts.

The whole idea behind WorldCard is that you will no longer have to painfully type in all your new contact details because you can just take a picture, using the iPhone’s camera, and it will do it for you. The makers of the app are keen to stress the selling points of this app over the competition, and some of these are:Superior text recognition (over competitors), Social Network Function, Recognition of 7 languages and E-mail Signature Capture.

Review, using it

“Take a picture. Add a contact. That’s it!”. What you have just read is an actual statement on the app store app page, so you’ll be wondering right now whether it really is that simple won’t you? Well, it is, actually.

The interface from first starting the app is surprisingly easy to get around (imaged above) and taking a picture of a business card is as easy as using your iPhone’s camera to take a picture of your cat.

In testing the app does a very good job of capturing the text on a business card and orders numbers properly most of the time (read this might turn you off). Once you have done taking pictures you’ll be presented with the data it has taken from the business card so you can review it accordingly, and clicking ‘export’ will save the image as a picture in your photo’s app and also the app’s very own card holder.

One of the features I like about this app is the grouping method, which allows you to group clients by whatever you like so; finance, marketing, HR, directors et cetera et cetera. Another cracking little feature this app has is the ability for you to send the contact details and photo of the card through text message and also e-mail. In tests this worked very well, and I found it convenient in real life situations over the course of a week.

This might turn you off

Despite the app’s fairly easy to use interface from start up there two huge downsides to this app, and the first is that it’s text recognition isn’t pitch perfect. Occasionally I had to edit contacts slightly myself, and the app didn’t seem to pick up the word ‘editor’ and instead put ‘enigma’ for some bizarre reason. The second turn off with this app is that it comes with very little instructions, meaning that although the initial user interface is easy and nice to use, there are a wealth of hidden neat little features such as a business card ‘cover flow’, a la Apple, which you’ll never find unless you want to.

Pricing

The price of this app in the UK is £3.99 from the app store and it’s aimed at business professionals or people with a  fetish for business cards (any takers?). I think this price may be around £1 too high, especially given the fact that this app is non essential.

Overall

Overall WorldCard Mobile is a nice little bit of business kit for any business person. Now, that’s not to say that it is perfect, however it is easy to use and it lives up to its promise of making your professional contacts easy to manage. In tests we found that despite the apps text recognition not being 100% perfect it wasn’t that much of a problem, however for 60% of people the lack of instructions to access the app’s cover flow and also the lack of instructions for anything, forcing users to trial and error, may prove too much.

Rating: (6/10)