Asus isn't exactly a big name in phones, but it has just announced the "Fastest Business PDA Phone in the World" in the form of the P565 Glide. This is a touch-screen Windows Mobile 6.1 phone with Asus's own Glide interface, powered by an 800MHz Marvell TavorP processor. (This comes out of the Intel XScale line, which started with the Digital StrongARM design.) Whether or not this is an advantage is a moot point: Asus quotes the talk-time as "3 hrs with 3G and 4 hrs with 2G," which would stop me from buying one even if I could afford it. However, I notice the software includes Business Card Recognition, which is already available on the Asus P505 and P527, as well as the Samsung U600, Sony Ericsson G900, Motorola A1600 and various other phones.
Business card recognition and conversion has been around for a long time -- I bought a Corex CardScan many years ago -- and several companies have developed software to do it on mobile phones, including Abbyy, Penpower and Hotcard. There's also Nokia Multiscanner freeware for Symbian (but I don't know if it will run on my Nokia 6630).
It seems to me that scanning/character recognition software should be built into every camera phone. Business card recognition may not appeal to that many people, but I can see other uses becoming important. One is just capturing and converting text, such short paragraphs from newspapers and magazines. Of course, you have to capture it before you can translate it using Babelfish, Google Translate or whatever. Scan/translate is a killer app for travellers.
Camera phones should also be able to read 2D and 3D bar codes so that you can stand in a shop and look products up on the web, or just catalogue your books/CDs more easily. Very few people will buy a device just to do this, but again, it's a killer app if it's built into your phone.
Are you doing his stuff today? If not, why not?
