I SCAN DOCUMENTS every day and use my Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc to deliver the results in one-tap elegance.
The under-appreciated camera optics on the Xperia Arc incorporate some of the best technology from Sony's range of devices. The low aperture rating of the camera mean I can assuredly snap hand-printed notes without flash filling them. This means sharp edges on characters and a better result when Evernote uses its OCR to produce indexed files of my work. Drawn work looks nicer when it's snapped and shared to a Flickr group.
In my day job as a multimedia lecturer, I often put my phone at a lone desk and ask students to snap and annotate work they have prepared for the class. During the first few weeks of the term, this meant a small queue forming towards the front of the room as each student tapped and saved their images. Then I started circulating the camera through the seated classroom, asking students to annotate their work with their name and Twitter nics. In one easy pass, I had an attendance roster and samples of practical work--all recorded in a relevant Evernote folder. Five weeks into the academic year, I noticed the documents were being scanned and uploaded faster than the 30 minutes it normally took. That's because several additional Xperia handsets were in pockets and purses, along with Evernote and Skitch on the handsets. We share public Evernote folders and that allows students to directly upload their work.
Three years ago, I had to set aside an hour to get this kind of work sorted with the help of a limited number of networked desktop scanners. Now the process is outsourced to the students themselves, the job goes faster and the work is immediately harvested, shared for critiques and archived as samples of work. I have a lot of respect for Sony Ericsson for helping me onto a higher rung on the ladder of practical education.
