Evernote’s Scannable for iOS scans documents and business cards quickly

Following its initial announcement back in October, Evernote has just launched Scannable for iPhone and iPad. The app scans documents and business cards, and can also control ScanSnap Evernote Edition scanners.

Scannable works like other modern scanning apps such as Scanbot and CamScanner: simply point your device’s camera at a paper document and you’ll automatically get a clean scanned image without having to crop, rotate or adjust color.

Once you’ve scanned a document, you can save it to to your Evernote account, Camera Roll, or iCloud storage, and share it via email or message. Scannable also lets you chain multiple scans together to create a single multi-page document.

This is standard fare for similar scanning apps, and Evernote also has a built-in scanning tool in its mobile apps. So what’s new here?

For one thing, Scannable features an automatic scan mode, which only requires users to point their cameras at a document and hold still — as opposed to the manual Evernote scanner. This feature works as well as Scanbot’s tool but doesn’t offer any one-tap color adjustment options.

Another notable feature in Scannable is its ability to parse information from business cards. When you scan a card, Scannable grabs your contact’s details and adds it all to your address book, pulling additional info and a photo from LinkedIn. Of course, you’ll need to be signed in to the professional social network on your device to enable this.

The same feature in Evernote saves the info to the default Evernote notebook, which isn’t as useful to me.

So, is Scannable worth a shot? Well, it’s fast, free to use and does that neat thing with business cards. On the other hand, competing apps like Scanbot give you more control over your scans, let you save documents as images or PDFs, and back them up to multiple cloud services (including Evernote). I’d say that if you deal with business cards often, or want to get through your scanning in a flash, it’s a good way to go.

➤ Scannable [iOS]