Thanks to the iPhone and iPad, I've managed to keep much of my law practice paperless. There are still times when paper is more convenient, but the last thing that I want in my life is unnecessary paper ... and business cards tend to fall into that category. Some business cards are from people who I want to add to the Contacts on my iPhone/iPad, so I'll want to take the time to enter all of the information from the card by hand. More often, I get business cards from people who I don't really want to add to my Contacts, such as vendors, but it is useful to keep the contact information someplace just to remember that I met them in case I do need to contact them in the future. ABBYY Business Card Reader is a $4.99 app that does what you would guess from the name; it takes a picture of a business card, performs optical character recognition to read the text on the business card without you having to manually type it all in, smartly determines the fields applicable to the text (name, phone number, e-mail address, etc.) and then saves the information in a contact entry. The app then lets you send that information to your main Contacts database, or you can just save it within the app itself. ABBYY CardHolder costs $2.99 and lacks some features such as the ability to send the information to the Contacts database on your iPhone, but you can add those features by paying an additional $1.99 as an in-app purchase. There are some minor cosmetic differences, but I don't see any substantive differences between paying $4.99 for Business Card Reader and paying $2.99 + $1.99 for CardHolder.
ABBYY was founded in 1989 by David Yang, Ph.D. Wikipedia says that he is "ranked among the most famous Russian IT-entrepreneurs." ABBYY is based in Moscow but has offices around the world and over 1,000 employees. It has long-produced PC software to convert images and PDF files into editable and searchable files, and the company is now applying that same technology to an iPhone app. The company sent me a free review copy of ABBY Business Card Reader and ABBYY CardHolder, and I paid for the in-app upgrade to compare the two apps.
You start by taking a picture of the business card. The app then scans the business card to read the text and identify which field best applies to the text. The optical character recognition (OCR) process just takes a few seconds.
Next the apps shows you a contact entry with the information from the OCR in the fields that the app considers appropriate. A few times the app was 100% perfect. Most of the time the app made some small errors in the OCR process, but when the app knows that it is guessing it highlights the suspect letters in red so it is easy to find the mistakes and fix them. If there are too many mistakes, you can just scan the card again; when I did so, I always saw different results. For example, in this first example the app that that my e-mail address was my company name; in the second example, the app correctly figured out that Adams and Reese was my company name, but it inserted a mistake period in the last word. Importantly, however, the app tends to do a really good job with getting numbers correct, which is very helpful considering how tedious it can be to add a bunch of numbers by hand.
Once you have edited the contact entry to fix any mistakes from the OCR process or the assignment of fields, the app with either add the contact to the in-app list of contacts, or, if you are using Business Card Reader or if you paid to upgrade CardReader, the app can send the contact information to your main Contacts app (or do both). If you have another entry with the same name, you are given the option to merge the information.
For contact in the app, the app provides you a list of entries that you can sort by first name, last name, company or date added. If you tap on a contact, you then see a picture of the card with buttons at the bottom that you can tap to call any of the phone numbers, e-mail any of the e-mail addresses, send a text message, see a website in Safari. In Business Card Reader and in the upgraded version of Card Reader, you can also tap to see the address on a map. You can also tap the pencil icon in the bottom corner to edit the entry. You can also send an entry as a .vcf file attached to an e-mail or in a text message. Except for the sort features, these are all features that you can already do with the main iPhone Contacts app, so while it is nice that the app does this too, there is nothing revolutionary here.
The app has lots settings that you can adjust. You can turn a flash on or off, decide whether to save each picture that you take to your camera roll, create different groups that you can apply to contacts in the app, and edit the contact fields. And as a reminder that ABBYY is an international company, you can select up to 22 languages to use when performing OCR.
The Business Card Reader app worked very well for me. In my tests of CardReader I ran into a few quirks, such as the app occasionally freezing up while performing the OCR process. (If this happens to you, force the app to quit and then launch the app again.)
I love having the ability to save a business card to the app itself and not add it to my full Contacts, great for those times when someone gives you a business card but you are unsure whether you will ever need it again but don't want to worry about keeping track of the card just in case you do. Having said that, I think that most attorneys who use this app will also want to have the ability to send information to the main Contacts database. For that reason, I recommend that you just purchase the $4.99 version at the outset. It has this main screen when you start the app with a big button to press to take a picture and another big button to press to see your in-app contacts, whereas the CardHolder version always just takes you to the list of contacts and you have to tap a tiny button in the top right to take a picture of a card.
But as noted, the differences between the two apps are mostly just cosmetic, so if you are a cautious spender you can get the $2.99 version today and then check out the app before you spend the extra $1.99 for the full features.
ABBYY Business Card Reader and ABBYY CardHolder are useful apps for anyone who receives business cards. The OCR process makes it much faster to enter the information from a business card, and I love that you can choose whether you save the information in the app or you add it to your main Contacts database.
Click here to get ABBYY Business Card Reader ($4.99): 
Click here to get ABBYY CardHolder ($2.99):
