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PRODUCT REVIEW
Force-feeding business cards to your PalmPilot
By Richard Echeandia
I don't know about you , but there are times when I have a love/hate relationship with Graffiti. I'm not certain whether its the barometric pressure, the current price of IBM stock or the color of my socks but there seem to be days when Graffiti and I just don't get along. Its usually on these days, of course , that I need to enter the most information and I end up wishing for a way to force feed words and letters to my PalmPilot. If your experience is like mine then you'll probably be interested in CardScan Plus 300, a recently updated product from Corex Technologies.
How is this product supposed to help?
CardScan Plus 300, shown in Figure A, is a hardware and software combination with one purpose in mind: to automate the task of entering business card information into your personal computer. The CardScan product itself has been around for years, but with the recent success of the PalmPilot, Corex has added a HotSync conduit to its contact management software and beefed up its documentation for PalmPilot users.
FIGURE A
This is how the CardScan Plus 300 looks when connected to your computer.
What is CardScan Plus 300?
There are two main components to CardScan Plus 300, the scanner hardware and the CardScan Plus 300 contact management/OCR software. Also included in the box are an external AC adapter and a pass-thru parallel printer cable. The CardScan software is supplied on a CD-ROM. A diskette version of the software was not included in the box I received for review but is available from Corex by calling a toll-free number.
Unpacking the box I discovered that the scanner unit is a small gray box approximately 7 inches wide, 6 inches deep and 3 inches tall (17 cm by 15 cm and 7 cm tall), small enough to be unobtrusive on most desktops. The scanner weighs just over 1.5 pounds (725g). Most of the weight in the box came from the external AC adapter. It's physically smaller than the scanner but tips the scales at just under two pounds. If you're a road warrior planning on bringing the CardScan Plus 300 with you to trade shows and conferences, your shoulder should budget an additional 5 pounds for schlepping around the hardware.
Installation/configuration
To begin the review, I installed the PalmPilot Desktop software on a new machine. I performed a HotSync once to verify that the normal PalmPilot conduit was working correctly between my PC and the PalmPilot. I then began to explore the physical connection of the CardScan Plus 300 to my computer. Because the CardScan Plus 300 is connected via the parallel port and I only had one parallel port on my computer, I had to disconnect the other device which was connected there (an external Syquest SparQ drive) and connect the CardScan Plus 300 in its place. The CardScan Plus 300 has a connector on its rear panel for your parallel printer so if you've only got one printer port and one printer, it should coexist peacefully with your other hardware. If you have more than one parallel device, you may need to add an additional parallel port to your computer. I went into the System Control Panel, removed the Syquest port driver and began the installation of the CardScan Plus 300 software.
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