Scanner Pro

Scanner Pro is one of my favorite applications for the iPhone. It’s pretty cheap, and it has one job that it performs admirably, which is to combine files into one PDF document.

The best way I discovered for using this application is to use the camera on your phone. You can either take new pictures while in the application, or you can import them from your camera roll. You can choose to have these load up in Black and White, Grayscale or Color. Holding your camera over the document you want to scan and snapping your picture works wonderfully.

Once you have your picture, you have to select either a portion of it, or the full picture. I typically just hit select all, because I normally want the full image. You also need to make sure you select the correct processing type. The application automatically selects text first processing, but if you’re sending an image, you want photo. You also need to choose your page size. After that, you can bundle it with other images to make a larger PDF document. When you’re finished, you can hit the actions page to enable password protection. I haven’t needed to do that yet, but I could see where password protection could come in handy.

Lastly, you have to get it off your phone. I really like how the application accomplishes this. You can hit the actions button to print or fax the PDF (although you have to have print n share to print things). You can email the PDF by touching the mail button. Or you can upload your file to Evernote (another application we have reviewed), Google Docs, Dropbox (again, this is reviwed elsewhere) or iDisk/WebDAV.

In all, I feel like this application is very simple, and very tight in its design. There aren’t many ways to get lost in it because it’s so straightforward. It works well, it gives you plenty of protection, and it has several ways to get your files off your phone to a variety of sources.