Up until now the latest innovation in portable document scanning was the single USB cable, powered by and transmitted through just one cable. Wowee. Visioneer now takes us further along to a world without wires – and hopefully paper too –  with their $200 compact scanning package.  Visioneer released the first truly portable wireless scanning solution, the Visioneer Mobility. What makes this so portable is the built-in 3.7V 1700mAh lithium-ion battery tucked inside and its ability to scan documents and images directly to an SD card, USB flash drive or mobile phone with no computer near by.

Hardware
The design is pleasing, a glossy white finish with just two buttons; power, and one to select between photographs, black and white or color document scanning. The power light gives you indication of your battery status, blue is good red is dead. On the back side you will find a mini-usb port, standard USB for USB flash drives, and the SD card slot. Much like typical scanners the Visioneer Mobility is adequately sized at about 1.75-inches high and 2.5-inches deep. You cannot open this up to remove a paper jam as most scanners allow you to, but there is a release switch on the back corner that will lift up the rollers incase a page does get jammed up.

You can scan items as small as 2 x 2 inches and as large as 8.5 x 11.7 inches. The downside is that there is no document feeder, so its a single page at a time with the Mobility. Just one small sacrifice for ultra-mobility I guess. This also leaves you with single sided scanning, duplex was not offered on this unit.

Battery life is excellent. I never needed to charge it once since I got for my tests. Visioneer rates the life to 300 full page scans per charge.

Specifications

Software
The software is for PC-only, but if you do use a PC you will get NewSoft BizCard SE to manage scanned business cards, Nuance OmniPage to convert your scanned documents into editable PDFs, and Nuance’s PaperPort to organize and share the scanned documents. I’m not a big fan of these software utilities, but I could see how they would benefit PC users for managing their workflow. With this type of scenario I would find myself just inserting an SD card or USB flash drive that contains the scanned images and copying them directly to my Mac, but that’s just me.

Performance
Pages come through easily, I never ran into serious problems with alignment unless I obviously fed the page in on an angle. In my tests it took roughly 7.5 seconds to scan a full page document and 9 seconds to scan a full page color photograph. Business cards are quicker at about 5 seconds. This is right in line with not-so-portable single USB-powered Fujtsu ScanSnap S1100 we looked at earlier this year. Image quality on photographs is a bit off, but nothing too serious. Text is crisp and easy to OCR afterwards.

Bottom Line
For the first truly portable scanner to hit the market, Visioneer did a fantastic job. Speed and accuracy are what you would expect from a portable scanner. The only downfall is its single-sidedness and lack of document feed. Other than that, you can scan directly to your mobile phone, SD Card and USB port with accuracy and speed. The included carry case and 2GB SD Card is a nice touch too.

If this isn’t portable enough, stay tuned for Visioneer’s CONNECT service where you can scan directly to cloud based services like Google Docs, Evernote, FilesAnywhere, OfficeDrop and DropBox.

[Visioneer Mobility]

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Why this hasn’t been done sooner is beyond me, but Visioneer has just changed the face of mobile document scanning with their “Visioneer Mobility” scanner. On the outside it looks like your plain old mobile USB scanner, but no, Mobility really means mobility. You don’t even need a computer to use this scanner. Just pop in an SD card, (1GB included) and begin to feed it reams of documents you’d like digitized. The Department of Homeland Security will fear this, WikiLeaks style extraction of confidential documents can be made without a computer. You’ll have to wait until March to get your hands on one, priced at $200 a full page can be had in 10 seconds flat.

[Visioneer]

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