Category: Geeks r Us
I received a blurb in E mail about a cell phone made by kerzweil that scans and reads text out loud. Just wondering if anybody has one and how good is it? I have a scanner that reads stuff but a cell phone would be a whole lot more portable if there is a good one out there.
You can find out all about this on www.blindbargains.com. It's basically a converted Nokia N82 cell phone (because of the 5mp camera I assume) turned into a portable zscanner, you could throw tings like WayFinder and Mobile Speak on it too to make it "bad ass". It's cool but it takes 15 seconds, approx, to scan a page (it'll be out Feb 15th). Processor power is less than a PC, still, of course, so it's a first generation product for sure. I'd be tempted, but for the price tag ($1600 I think) I'd rather wait half a year for a more powerful phone, better processor, even better camera, but I'm definitely quite thrilled and would buy this now if I had the money.
The software is $1595 and the N82 is around $500. I think I'll wait for a bit and let the price drop. This software should work on similar phones, and while the N82 is currently the only phone with the needed camera, I'd expect that other phones will be available in coming months.
will wait on this one. Let everybody else get the bugs out especially if this is a first generation product. Thanks for the feedback.
i have had this phone demoed to me with the software on it. to my mind, as a first generation product, this kicks some serious ass. whatever I did with the camra, be it take a pic of a glossy pizza menu or a letter from a bank, or a screwed up letter which had been down the back of the sofa so to speak, it still read everything near perfect. it even got the real small print on the back of an invoice, all the T's and c's that are really hard to read due to the print being really small. I performed many tests with the knfb mobile reader and could not confuse the product. it read almost any computer printed material i put in front of it. as I say, for first gen product this is great. There are some modifications I could suggest, and I will be suggesting those, but these are mainly in the word search field, IE looking for a particular word in a document with a find command. otherwise it's great. I scanned a business card with the reader and managed to get the reader to spell out the email address on the card, as I didn't hear the address correctly. I am seriously impressed by this product. and with talks on the phone as well, it will make a really great [package.