Who needs a scanner? Use your mobile device instead.

ITworld|December 20, 2013

Scanning documents, including converting them to text, can be a big productivity booster. If you need to do it, though, there's no need to buy a scanner and fancy OCR software. Instead, you can do it right on your iOS or Android device with these eight great apps.

Genius Scan

This great iOS app is my favorite of the bunch. It's a breeze to scan anything in, and there are a slew of very helpful extras, such as using keywords to tag documents to make them easy to find. You can also easily share scanned files via Wi-Fi. Remarkably, it's free, although if you want even more extras, such as no ads, and wireless printing using AirPrint, you'll have to fork over $3 for the Plus edition. I'm perfectly content with the free one.

Scanner Pro by Readdle

Here's another iOS scanning app, and it'll do pretty much any scanning job you throw at it. What's especially useful is that it can upload your scanned images directly to Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, and other cloud-based storage services. You can also easily email anything you scan, by just hitting the Send button. It costs $2.99.

Turbo Scan

This $2.99 iOS app has some features that make it worth considering, notably the ability to take three scans of the same document, and then use them to give you the clearest scan possible.

Perfect OCR

This $3.99 app, from the makers of Turbo Scan, scans documents and then turns them into text. It works in multiple languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, and Russian. You'll be able to edit the text, copy it to the clipboard, and more.

Mobile Doc Scanner

This free Android app is great not just for basic scanning, but for doing automatic cleanup on what you've scanned for the clearest document possible. You can set many different types of options for this, such as for noise removal. The basic app is free, but includes ads and puts watermarks on your scanned files. A better bet is the $1 version, which eliminates that.

Google Drive

You likely don't know it, but Google Drive includes very nice scanning capabilities. Not only does it create PDF files to save to Google Drive, but it will perform OCR on them as well.

EverNote

Yes, the best productivity app of all time (at least as far as I'm concerned) includes a scanning feature as well. Scan anything into a PDF and save it to Evernote, so it's available on any device you use, or on the Web. It also does OCR, which has the added benefit of letting you search through all of your scanned documents.

Scan to PDF Free

This free Android app lets you scan documents to PDF, and even thought it's free, doesn't include ads or watermarks. However, unlike other apps, it doesn't straighten the scanned file or perform cropping -- you'll have to do that yourself.

Preston Gralla — Contributing editor

Preston Gralla is the author of more than 45 books, including Windows 8 Hacks (O'Reilly, 2012) and How the Internet Works (Que, 2006).

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