Review of Scanbot 3.0 Pro for iPhone

I like apps that don’t get in the way. I like them even more when they do their job properly.

Scanbot 3.0 for iPhone belongs to this category. This app does two things:

  • It is a PDF scanner
  • It works as a QR reader

To the best of my knowledge this is the only app that can do both things seamlessly and without changing the user interface between the two modes.

Seldom I find a QR code to scan, but I’m that type of person that thinks that having a dedicated QR code reading app on my iPhone is a waste. Having an app that does both things is liberating.

The main screen is extremely minimalistic, but in the case of a document scanning app this is godsend. The interface has only five buttons:

  • A toggle button to choose whether you want to scan documents with one or multiple pages
  • A button to snap a picture. This is usually not needed because Scanbot takes pictures automatically the moment it is able to find the edges of the document. The only thing you need to pay attention to is to hold your iPhone steady with two hands. That’s very useful
  • A button to access your photos in case you want to generate the PDF file from a picture already stored in your photo gallery
  • A button to manually turn the camera flash on
  • A close button to go to the list of files already created with the app

Scanbot 3.0 can automatically upload your PDF files to Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, Evernote and other common cloud providers. The most interesting fact about version 3.0 of Scanbot is that this app is iCloud Drive ready. This means that once OS X Yosemite is released, the app will be able to upload the scanned files directly to your Mac without using any 3rd party tools.

The app . There is also an in-app purchase option to unlock some Pro features:

  • OCR text recognition
  • Passcode lock and Touch ID
  • Smart file naming (to dynamically add dates/places to the filename). The way the developers added this feature is neat. You simply need to add the data tokens relatives to the information you want to appear in the filename
  • Themes

The Pro features cost an additional EUR 4.49, which is totally worth it if you need OCR text recognition and some additional flexibility with filenames.

Readers of this blog know that for many years my go-to choice for iOS PDF scanning has been (my review here) ,but after testing Scanbot 3.0 Pro for a few days I’m willing to place it on my home screen.

This is a very well made app, and the developers deserve our support.

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