If you still carry around bulky business card holders from over 10 years ago, I’m sure you come across people who think you’re old school.

And while there’s totally nothing wrong with being sentimental with your “collection”, there comes a time when we have to go out of our comfort zones and attempt to be daring in this brave, new world of technology.

These days, portability=mobility. And what’s an expensive smartphone good for if it can’t make things a little more convenient for you, eh?

Do you find yourself too attached to the visual security provided by physical business cards, but need a rest from all that multiple cardholder toting?

Do you want the ability to store ALL your business card contacts on your iPhone but still see how the actual cards look like?

Well, like many things, there’s an app for that. There’s WorldCard Mobile.

What can it do?

1. Capture actual business card image (front and back) and store them for viewing/cataloging.

2. Recognize information on card and transfer them to appropriate fields on the iPhone contacts list.
3. Provides additional fields for photos and social media accounts like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. It can even search for these information online (Internet connection required, of course).
4. Settings/options for saving contacts to the app’s CardHolder only or to your iPhone contacts.

5. Sort contacts lists in your preferred order and create “Groups” for organizing and identifying your contacts.

6. It can do “Email Signature Capture” and store it to your contacts as well.

7. It can also store all your data in the Cloud for easy and convenient access anytime, anywhere.

How does it work?

This nifty business card scanning app uses OCR (optical character recognition) technology to “read” (recognize) characters on your business cards and automatically transfer them to appropriate fields on your iPhone contacts.

It also stores the scanned image of your business card and sorts them in the order you choose.

This is done in 5 easy steps:
1. Take a photo of your business card.
2. Rotate photo as needed.
3. Tap on “Recognize” to initiate OCR.
4. Edit minor details.
5. “Export” to CardHolder.

From then on, you can easily browse through all your business card images through a beautiful cover flow. From the contact list screen, simply tilt the device to landscape mode and it automatically reverts to cover flow.

App Test Drive

1. Stability – Since testing, I’ve opened and closed the app for at least 40 times. Made it run on the background along with Mail, Twitter, Facebook, Kindle and other “heavy” apps. I’ve encountered no problem whatsoever. In the course of my test, this app never hanged on me nor did it crash. Also reliably stayed in the same state I left it when I returned to it after using other apps.

2. Usability – It’s very easy to use, no complicated taps to figure out. Anybody who uses the app for the first time but has had considerable experience with the iPhone will never go wrong with it.

3. Design – The interface is clean and uncluttered by unnecessary distractions. The cover flow support for image view is beautiful.

4. Performance – Many apps out there find it hard to balance design vs. function, most times overlooking one for the other. This one works as advertised. No frills. Simply works well, and works well every time.

I’ve even tried capturing images in low light to see how far it can recognize characters and it did pretty well.

In low light, with shadows over the image, some characters were naturally hard for the app to recognize. Words ending in “ol” for example were read as “d”, “a” as “o”, “rn” as “m”, “f” as “t”, etc. But these are fairly normal OCR recognition issues sometimes caused by italicized or too fancy fonts that are easily editable during the transfer process which is also one of the good features of the app.

It worked extremely well with numbers, recognizing them 100% of the time and even recognizing abbreviations.

Scribbles and doodles on the business cards are ignored (typical of OCRs of course) and on some occasions, whole words. I’ve found that simpler fonts are recognized best. But it also worked fairly well with other uncommon fonts.

5. Price – It’s currently priced at $6.99 on the App Store. And for an app that scans business cards and does everything I mentioned on this post, I’d say it’s worth it. I would have given this a perfect 5 if not for the price though. :)

6. Verdict – (4/5 stars ) This app is App-laudable!

Note:
This is NOT A PAID POST. A promo/redeem code was provided to RJMarmol.com to download particular app for review purposes.