Heart on a Cloud: Doxie, the Intelliscanner
Portable scanners have never caused any sort of hoopla for me. They usually are mind-numbingly plain and a little too straightforward if you ask me. They seem like a box inside of a box. But, what I can most appreciate about Apparent’s Doxie Intelliscanner is that it actually looks girl-friendly and actually cute. By that, I mean the pink hearts added another level of intrigue to an otherwise discreet scanner. For those of you who celebrate philogyny or the men out there who are not too ashamed to admit that pink is their color, it is time to consider the Doxie. Oh, and it’s a pretty great scanner as well.
Doxie is a USB-powered 600-dpi photo, document, and if you so desire, receipt scanner designed to integrate with a number of Web and Mac apps. The slim, portable scanner uses USB power to turn trees into PDFs, JPEGS, or PNG files and get this; Doxie scans directly to the cloud. For those of you who think I’m referencing cotton balls in the sky, Google it. For those of you who understand this lingo, the exclusive Doxie Cloud PDF hosting service allows for instant document sharing via e-mail, chat, and Twitter. If you use Doxie’s cloud service, you can hoard pictures and documents and have their URLs shared or Tweeted automatically into cyberspace for you. They even released an update to their software that allows files to be sent easily to your iPad and iPhone, making your scanned documents available in the iBooks app!
Doxie is also a mindreader (after all, I’m considering her a very knowledgeable woman) that knows when you’re trying to clean up a photo or scan it. She then graciously offers to put the photo into Flickr, Tumblr, iPhoto Library, or another designated web app. “Document scanners are frustrating and poorly designed,” said Travis J. Hicks, chief operating officer. “Doxie, on the other hand, is amazingly portable, USB powered, and comes with elegant software that scans paper directly to PCs, Macs, and web apps like Google Docs, Evernote, Acrobat, and Flickr. You’re bound to be impressed.” We couldn’t say it better ourselves.
Doxie was also the perfect travel companion, as it weighs under 11 ounces. The scanned copies were clear and the 600dpi resolution kept them sharp. Scans can be done at up to 600dpi in 24bit color in as little as 12 seconds per page (if you turn off color and lower the resolution). This isn’t as fast as some scanners that we’ve seen, but is pretty good.
And those pink hearts we mentioned? The largest heart is actually your one touch button for a single scan. We were able to purchase online directly for around $129. For those of you who are looking for a few more feature at a higher price point, we’d suggest the Fujitsu ScanSnap S300. It’s the world’s smallest duplex ADF scanner, easily taking in both sides of a document or business card at once- a feature we only missed occasionally but can save time if your documents are usually double-sided. Also, if it’s bar codes that you are scanning, the same company behind the Doxie, Apparent, also makes the nifty Intelliscanner Mini that we reviewed not long ago.
