Barcode Scanners vs. Scanning Apps

November 12, 2018 by Amelia Albanese |

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A host devices’ camera is designed to take pictures, not to decode barcodes. Scanning barcodes requires a careful two-step process– first focusing the device’s camera on a barcode to be clear on the screen, and then scanning. The user then must toggle out of their device’s screen to view anything other than the scanned barcode. This affects the speed of the workflow. Every barcode must go through the same process – refocusing, then scanning.

Tests (conducted by Socket Mobile) prove using a phone application to scan a barcode can take 2-3 times longer than a barcode scanning solution. The process can take even longer with variables such as unsteady hands or in a mobile environment (i.e. moving vehicle). A phone’s camera does not focus easily because it does not have a designated aimer like a proper barcode scanner does. 

A device’s battery also drains faster on a phone than with a scanning app. Barcode scanning requires the phone taking images and supporting an application that decodes barcode data, which drains the battery faster.

In addition, toggling the same screen used for scanning barcodes and checking the list of scanned barcodes is a hassle and time-consuming.

The cost of application upgrades and the requirements for changing devices depends on the app. 

What can you expect from an application that uses a smartphone device’s camera for scanning? 

·       Cheaper setup costs

·       Slow solution – 2-3 times slower than a designated scanner

·       Costly overtime– Requiring 2-3 more people to complete a 1-person job

·       Drains device battery faster

·       No scanning aimer provided

·       Limited support on symbologies – Not all barcodes can be scanned, nor are the settings modified easily

·       Limited users – Each scanning session requires logging into an application that is not shared between users

·       Limited customization – An application is set with its own abilities and is therefore limited

With a Socket Mobile scanner, data can be transferred to your desired application with a simple point and press of the button. On the device screen, users can observe the data assigned to the corresponding barcode with no need to toggle back and forth between screens.  

Socket Mobile provides a range of options for handheld scanners, including scanners which allow you to connect to mobile devices. With this feature, Socket Mobile offers an ergonomic one-handed and long-lasting scanning solution, improving the convenience of a device's downloaded application. 

Contact us to discuss your requirements of Hand Held Terminal Supply. Our experienced sales team can help you identify the options that best suit your needs.

Using a barcode scanner that transfers data to a designated device via Bluetooth® wireless technology:

·       Cost-effective investment

·       Fast solution – 2-3 times faster than a scanning app

·       Long-lasting battery power – Up to two work shifts

·       Scanning aimer – Provides speedy/accurate reading

·       Dependable technology – Built specifically for barcode scanning jobs

·       Customization options – Select symbologies, vibrations and tones, modes, etc.

Although barcode scanning applications are reasonable and cost-friendly, designated barcode scanning devices prove to be a more usable, long-term option.

Smartphones are the Swiss Army knives of the digital world, and mobile scanning apps are one of the best examples of why. Using your phone’s camera, these apps can scan and extract text from virtually any document—plus whiteboards, books, and more—while automatically correcting for distortion and skew. After spending more than 50 hours researching 22 scanning apps and testing 13 of them, our favorite is the lean, efficient, and free-to-use Adobe Scan (for Android and iOS ). It’s simple to use, capable of beautiful scan quality, and equipped with excellent text-recognition capabilities.

Apple Notes isn’t just for celebrity apologies: It’s also great at capturing basic scans of documents, whiteboards, and more—and it produces some of the cleanest OCR results we’ve ever seen.

Lens is especially good if you use Microsoft’s Office suite, but it’s a solid option for anyone who wants free scanning with (mostly) properly formatted OCR results.

Adobe Scan (for Android and iOS) is great at capturing the sort of documents life throws at you every once in a while—stuff like rebate forms, tax documents, and the occasional business card. It isn’t as complex or as powerful as our upgrade pick, SwiftScan, but it’s free, simple to use, and produces scans that look even better than those from other top scanning apps. It automatically stores every scan you capture on Adobe Document Cloud, which means your scans are accessible from any phone, tablet, or computer. And Adobe Scan’s useful dedicated scanning modes mean you can add new contacts from business cards and fill out forms right on your device. An optional Premium subscription at $10 per month offers extra storage, allows you to export scans to Word and Excel files, and adds the ability to extract text from even longer documents, but we think SwiftScan is a better paid option.

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SwiftScan’s paid versions(SwiftScan Pro for Android and SwiftScan VIP for iOS) provide more features and customization than our other picks, including custom folders for better organization, smart file naming, iCloud syncing, and automatic uploading to your choice of more than a dozen cloud storage services. SwiftScan produces good-looking scans across a variety of document types, and it can perform optical character recognition (OCR) in dozens of languages without uploading your documents to the cloud. These text-recognition results are very accurate, if not quite best in class. However, given the subscription model—$5 per month or $25 per year for Android users and $8 per month or $40 per year for iPhone owners—we think it only makes sense for people who would use its extra features on a regular basis.

If you like the idea of Adobe Scan’s simplicity and zero-dollar price tag but spend a lot of time working in the Microsoft Office suite, then Microsoft Lens (for Android and iOS) is the way to go. Its user interface is similarly sparse, but the output options include Word documents and PowerPoint slides in addition to PDFs. Its scans don’t look as clean as what you can get from Adobe Scan, Apple Notes, or SwiftScan, and you may find its sharing options annoyingly limited. But its excellent text recognition and well-formatted output almost make up for those drawbacks.

If you’re an iPhone user, you’re probably also an Apple Notes user. But you might not know that in addition to being a great place to jot down important info, it’s also a surprisingly powerful mobile scanning app. Like Adobe Scan, it automatically saves all of your scans to the cloud—in this case, iCloud—so you can access them on multiple devices, and it performs extremely accurate OCR by default. If you have an iPhone and are just scanning the occasional lunch receipt, business card, or homework assignment, you probably don’t need another app. But despite its pluses, Notes does have a few shortcomings: It can’t export searchable PDFs, it has a limited range of OCR languages, and it can only export PDFs and raw text.

If you want to learn more, please visit our website Barcode Programmer.