WorldCard Mobile on HTC HD2 – Easy Capturing Contact Details

MobilityMinded reviewed the HTC HD2 a few weeks ago, and my personal wrap-up conclusion was the following:

“The HTC HD2 is a very well balanced Windows Phone for various usage scenarios, and with a bulk load of added value not only in terms of technology and hardware but also in terms of software innovations as well. HTC has done an amazing job and set the bars significantly higher.”

In this article I would like to have a thorough and in-depth look at another software innovation on the HTC HD2, which is the WorldCard Mobile application from PenPowerInc. This application helps endusers, in particular business people, to capture contact details from business cards and export this information to the contacts on your Windows Phone.

    

Sequence of capturing contact information from a business card

On the HTC HD2 you simply start WorldCard Mobile from the renewed Start Menu in the folder “Tools”. In the left screenshot above you see the WorldCard Mobile icon (right column, second row), while in the right screenshot above you see the mainscreen of WorldCard Mobile.

As you can see the WorldCard Mobile mainscreen consists of a huge start button with a camera logo on it, and just below you see a kind of toolbar with three additional buttons: help, about and exit. I will come back later in this article on the latter buttons.

You want to capture contact details from a business card, so you tap on the start button and the camera software on the HTC HD2 opens to take a picture / photo from the business card. In this example I used my own mobilityminded business card and removed some content for “privacy” reasons. So I let the HTC HD2 camera autofocus on the business card, take the picture while you are being redirected to the WorldCard Mobile screen below.

      

In the left screenshot above you can see the picture of the business card, and if you are not satisfied with the picture quality or the picture is overexposed you can re-capture with use of the right softkey.  In the toolbar just above the softkeys you can zoom in, or rotate the picture 90 degrees clockwise or counter clockwise if WorldCard Mobile hasn’t recognized the orientation by itself. The buttons in this toolbar are optimized for fingerfriendly use.

Furthermore you can see a large button on top of the screen (above the picture of the business card), which shows the language -in case of the screenshot- English (USA). By tapping on the button you can change the language. The right screenshot above shows you the possible options on the HTC HD2 running on a WWE ROM. I would love to hear if a Dutch language file is included if you run a NL ROM on your HTC HD2. If you have selected the right language, you complete this step of the overall process with the recognize command on the left softkey.

      

The screenshot above shows the first result from the ocr text recognition of the picture of the MobilityMinded businesscard. I don’t know if it is that my name is not very common or that it is because of the fonttype and height but my name isn’t recognized by default. The company info, webpage and the second part of the e-mail address which is shown on the bussiness card.

The recognized texts are in this example without any error. I want to manually add the first and last name by tapping on the + button of the grey name heading. In the right screenshot above you can choose the field you want to enter, so I select first name and enter it. To enter the last name I tap on the + button again (and remark you can’t select first name anymore) and enter the last name, while I don’t need to enter any additional notes.

      

The left screenshot above shows the contact information after manually editting the contact information. I would like to emphasize the importance of having this edit step, otherwise uncomplete or wrong contact details would be saved in your phone’s memory. In the worst case scenario it would irectly be synchronized with your Microsoft Exchange account as well.

You can furthermore see that you can select a category from the pull down menu in which you want to save the specific contact. When you are satisfied with the contact details all the fields and you reviewed them on correctness and accuracy, you can complete the whole contact details capturing process by using the export command on the left softkey.

As you can see in the right screenshot the contact details are saved successfully into the phone’s memory and synchronized with my Microsoft (hosted) Exchange account with Sherweb.

 

      

Three other buttons in the WorldCard Mobile mainscreen

In the left screenshot above you can see the WorldCard Mobile mainscreen again. In this section I would like to quickly look at the additional buttons on the mainscreen in order to provide a complete (as possible) overview of the WorldCard Mobile application.

The most right button, in the left screenshot this button is completely grey and has two arrows pointing to the left, triggers the exit command and results simply in closing  WorldCard Mobile. The button in the middle with the folded corner opens the about screen, which is shown in the right screenshot above. For example you can see the version number of WorldCard Mobile.

The most left button with the question mark opens WorldCard Mobile Help. The helpfile of an application is sometimes an underrated part. The screenshots below clearly show that this is not the case with WorldCard Mobile Help.

    

The WorldCard Mobile Help is pretty extensive and there are various way to explore. The first option is by tapping on “contents” which opens a table of contents with clickable hyperlinks, which is shown in the right screenshot above. Another way to explore the WordlCard Mobile Help is tap on “search”, which opens up a search box and lets you enter a search string. Finally there is also the way of going to the previous or next page of WorldCard Mobile Help.

 

Concluding thoughts and wrap-up 

I would like to start this concluding section with some quotes from George Ponder, Editor of WMExperts in the article: “WorldCard Mobile – Business Card Scanning that Actually Works“

“In testing WorldCard, I found it to be more productive with business cards with simple layouts. The more elaborate layouts tend to throw the recognition software more curve balls but have no fear, when thrown a curve ball, the application can be adjusted manually.”

I can only agree with George Ponder that the graphical design and layout out a business card can impact the quality and accuracy of the output after the first text recognition step. However like outlined in the application overview it is no problem to manually review and edit the contact details, before saving the information into your Windows Phone.

“I found the more you use WorldCard Mobile, the more it learns the card layouts. WorldCard can also be used for other text documents such as return addresses on envelopes or advertisements in publications. Keep in mind that the recognition of fields may need a little more adjusting in these situations.”

There is indeed -or at least it seems that way- a self-learning mechanism build-in in the WorldCard Mobile software on the HTC HD2. Furthermore very cool that George Ponder has found different scenarios in which he can use WorldCard Mobile.

Overall I’m very satisfied with WorldCard Mobile and this software is a valuable addition on the HTC HD2, like the Wi-Fi Router application which I recently reviewed as well. The accuracy of the ocr text recognition is more than ok, and therefore WorldCard Mobile increases you productivity and efficiency when entering contact details. WorldCard Mobile can even beat entering contact details in Microsoft Outlook on my Lenovo X60 tablet, but is a superior tool for the mobile professional on the road.