CamCard is one of those casually life-changing apps – in short, by recognising text on business cards, it spells the end of the ancient rolodex or, more likely, the drawer full of disorganised old bits of cardboard acquired at business meetings.
The premise is pleasingly simple: if somebody gives you a business card, use the camera on your phone to take a picture of it. CamCard recognises the text, stores it, categorises it and files it along with the image of the card. The character recognition varies from perfect on plain cards to useless on complicated ones. But overall, this is an app that saves hours of either hunting for that card you’ve lost or cumulatively typing up every contact you ever make over years.
Where CamCard comes into its own, however, is in its additional features: you can introduce contacts electronically, it will recognise 16 languages, back everything up online and synchronise with other address books.
While getting started with the app is a laborious process, because photographing many cards is tedious, it does at least offer a batch mode that takes some of the pain out of the job. Camcard's larger weaknesses are with occasional problems with the camera locking up, resulting in a problem that could only be solved on my Galaxy Nexus by restarting the whole device, and with imperfect character recognition. Even with those drawbacks, however, it's one of a very few apps I'd regard as essential.
