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.
