The PodPad Wireless Document Scanner allows scanning on the go with Bluetooth connection to your smartphone for sending of documents wherever your work takes you.
Ease of Use, Performance: 4/5
Look & Feel: 3/5
Features: 4/5
How much I enjoy 3/5
Recommendation: 3.5/5 Stars
PodPad is a unique scanner that uses a Bluetooth capable smartphone and an app to send documents to email addresses for easy document scanning on the go but only through an Android app. PodPad is a unique scanner and includes the PodPad scanner, a wall power adapter, USB power cable, auto power cable and a CD with instructions and drivers along with a quick instruction brochure.
The PodPad connects to your Android smartphone using Bluetooth and uses an app developed by Genius or your company can develop their own using the available software development kit. The PodPad app on the android smartphone is easy to use with only a few pages including settings to setup and pair the device, choose the email you want to send to and the image quality.
You can send using either 150 dots per inch or 300 DPI and pairing the device is relatively simple but you will need to pair it every time you start the app up. The app simply has a few lines to fill in for every scan with customer information and user name to keep things organized when sending.
The scans are lower resolution so you cannot expect to be using the PodPad to scan and send images but for simple receipts and documents like orders or invoices it should work fine. The scanner app receives the document and converts it into a PDF document then emails it through the smartphone when you send the message from your email program.
You need to have an email setup on your phone to send the document and you can use email services like Gmail to easily send documents on the road. I was a little concerned about the scanner taking pages in and at times turning the page slightly but this did not seem evident when I looked at the scans from my email program when I received them.
To send documents to specific emails you simply load the app and set the email address in settings and then scan an image after filling in the documents name and sender information. You can easily send documents wherever you can get phone reception using your smartphones email which worked well for every email and scan I tried but the scans quality is not the best.
Images are almost unusable and you could not rely on the PodPad if you needed to send them but documents like emails or invoices worked well for my many test scans of emails, invoices and other documents. I was able to read emails and documents from 12 point font down to 8 point easily but smaller fonts can be a bit hard to read.
I did not have any problems that a simple repeat scan did not solve and never had a continuous problem where I could not rescan the document. I am not sure what happens when the app says the scanner was not responding but simply repeating the scan worked every time I had this problem.
The PodPad mobile scanner worked well for the quality of images and I did not find any other scanners currently on the market that can do what this does without using a laptop or other computer. I did find a scanner that uses a smartphone to scan but it uses a flash drive or an SD card along with the smartphone and does not email directly through an app.
The PodPad connects to a smartphone directly with Bluetooth and sends your document for the price of about $200 which is pretty reasonable for a document scanner that is not only mobile but wireless. If you’re looking for a scanner that can be used for directly sending documents using a smartphone the PodPad from Genius is worth looking into for a on the go solution for business.
PodPad Website
