Some people may argue that paper business cards are already obsolete, but I think they still have their place in our increasingly paperless society. At the same time, it can be such a pain to enter the contact information manually for each person after the fact. The new Plustek MobileOffice S800 is supposed to fix that.

Instead of going back to the office with a big pile of business cards to manually enter into your contact list, you can just scan them and the software will recognize the info. This gets imported into Cardiris V4 and can then be exported in a variety of formats. Good news, right? Well, not exactly.

The MobileOffice S800 is marketed as an “ultra portable, palm sized business card scanning and management solution,” but it can’t actually operate on its own. Instead, it has to be USB-powered and it has no internal memory of its own. It has to be connected to a computer to work.

Yeah, it’s not exactly all that useful for when you’re actually at the trade show exchanging business cards, but it might be okay when you’re back at your hotel room. Then again, aren’t there already smartphone apps that do this by taking a picture of the business card instead? Aren’t these scanners almost obsolete already?