Quick Guide: Scanner Apps for Your Smartphone or Tablet

In many ways smartphones like the Apple iPhone 6 or Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge have come to replace cameras, TVs, and handheld video recorders and you can add one more to that list – the scanner. That’s because a growing number of robust apps can replace your bulky scanner and increase productivity and this week, I want to tell you about about three of the best.

For iOS there’s Readdle’s Scanner Pro, capable of easily handling anything you throw its way. Take a picture of whatever you want to scan. The program then makes whatever is in the pic “look” scanned. Especially useful is the function that allows you to upload scanned images to Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, and other cloud-based storage services. Or email it to you or someone else simply by pushing the “Send” button. This one is $2.99.

Android fans will want to consider Mobile Doc Scanner 3 + OCR. Transform everything from receipts and invoices to white boards and magazine articles with the app also known as MDScan. Just take a picture, let the program do its thing, and you have a file that looks like every other scan you’ve ever made. Best of all, you can take a bunch of pictures on the fly and let the software process them later. Also allows for upload to cloud-based services. The price at the Google Play store is $4.99.

If you’re looking for a free option (iOS, Android, Windows), there’s Genius Scan from The Grizzly Labs. Works like the others – take a pic and the software makes whatever is in the pic look scanned. Genius Scan gives a ton of great options like fingerprint security, the ability to assign a password to a specific scan so that no one can snoop on you, and the ability to send scans to the cloud.