Business card scanning for Android

[Keleia 0]

Good morning,

 

I just wanted to pop on here for a quick minute and introduce myself and ask a question that perhaps EN members and Moderator might be able to help answer.  I'm Keleia, and live in the Pacific Northwest.  I am currently using Android os on my smartphone and also my tablet.  I just upgraded to premium EN, and was very disappointed that I am unable to use the business card scanning app. 

 

Since I am a premium member, when can I (and everyone else!) expect to get what I am paying for?  I absolutely love using EN, and I ask this question with all sincerity. 

 

EN has been around since 2009 (I think!!)  Android is a very good os, and EN really needs to get the business card scanning app up and running. 

 

Does anyone have a work-around idea or use with another app that might help me?

 

Thanking you all in advance,

 

Off to start my day,

 

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Hi and welcome Keleia,
The debate about iOS getting things before Android and so on has been ongoing. The same but opposite debate has also been ongoing. As has been the case since the dawn of Evernote, since each platform has its own team and release schedule, new features don't always get pushed to each client at exactly the same time (in some cases, some don't make the leap at all). There are 101 reasons for this ranging from the number of maintenance issues a particular platform has at any given time compared to others, or where a platform is in a release cycle, and so on.
For each iOS and Android, you can find features that made it to one before the other, or which one currently has and another does not. Really it is only Evernote staff that could explain any given feature disparity, and I don't think it is an issue of favouring one platform over another. (Now, I'm NOT saying that this is the BEST way Evernote could go about things, or that it is the only way, or that it doesn't create some problems, but this is the reality of how Evernote appears to work, so it's what we get to deal with.)

The rest of this post is not to continue the debate about iOS vs. Android

As for your current situation, Evernote's marketing on the topic of business card scanning pretty clearly stated this was an iPhone/iPad feature at the time of release. For example:
http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2013/12/12/evernote-for-iphone-and-ipad-get-business-card-scanning-and-more/

So it is not clear what gave you the impression that it was something Android had. I haven't seen any marketing that suggests this feature is available to Android.

While I have always been of the mind that Evernote needs to be much more explicit about what features are available on what platform, especially for anything premium-related. But this current wave of marketing for business card scanning has pretty clearly indicated this is iPhone/iPad.

As for getting "what you are paying for", the price of premium covers more than just business card scanning. Business card scanning is one of MANY premium features, of which Business Card Scanning is one very new and rather small part. You are also getting the 1gb quota, faster OCR, searchable PDFs/DOCX, offline notebooks on mobile, higher notebook limits, higher limit on number of notebooks you can share, higher note size limit, I'm likely missing many others...
So these are core features available on every platform (maybe there's an obscure exception...?) and it is these that make up the foundation of what premium is and is, more than anything else, what you are paying for.

So, I guess it comes down to whether all of those more core premium features are worth it. If not, perhaps best to drop down to free until Evernote makes Business card scanning available on Android.

As for when it will be available, Evernote is (in)famously tight-lipped about release dates and their development schedule, so it is unlikely we'll hear about it until it is already in our laps!

I know this is not likely the answer you are looking for. That being said, we know from the recent blog post that it is coming to Android "soon", whatever that means. So hang in there and enjoy the other perks of your premium membership!

[gazumped 11,666]

Meantime I use CamScanner for quick and dirty snaps of random documents and cards - nothing will do the same LinkedIn lookups that are said be to possible with the new app - but I'm also an Android user and I waiting too..