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Windows Phone's Office Lens app wants to replace your scanner


Need a quick and dirty copy of a receipt, document or restaurant menu? Your smartphone's camera can make a rough facsimile -- but Microsoft thinks that it can do better. According to a Windows Phone Store landing page, Office Lens leverages Microsoft OneNote, optical character recognition and your smartphone's camera to put "a scanner in your pocket." The page seems to only be a placeholder for now, but the idea is pretty straightforward: snapshots are synced to the cloud, saved to your device and automatically adjusted for color and readability. Printed documents can be edited and searched, thanks to the aforementioned OCR technology and the app even has glare and shadow removal features to clean up pictures of your office whiteboard. Unfortunately, the demo page reveals very little about how well the program works, featuring only a single screenshot that reveals... the beta tester's tabletop. There's no word on when this app will be available to the public, but feel free to score a quick tease at the adjacent source link.