Scanning...

I have been posting a lot about scanning bar codes with mobile phones. I can't help it. In Japan they're everywhere, and good to kill time in lines and on the train. DoCoMo has even been experimenting with audio codes so that your phone can interpret digital signals encoded into music and other audio. I smell a whole new marketing channel. Maybe I should get help for my thing with phones. I guess I could look up a shrink with EZ-Navi Walk...

I managed to free up enough time in The Netherlands to try out a couple code scanners. I tried out some mcodes on a Siemens SL75 and a SonyEricsson K600i, and ShotCode on the SonyEricsson K600i only. I downloaded the ConnexTo mcode scanner and ShotCode's scanner to both phones from their respective mobile sites and gave each a try.

On the Siemens, mcodes didn't scan, but that could easily be a device quirk, and the version for this phone was still in beta when I tried it out.

On the K600i it worked great. Even the Mobile Monday mcode in my previous post on this topic scanned and recognized in a couple seconds. The only problem was that the active camera was the user-facing video-call camera. This made it a little tricky to aim the camera. I played with the camera settings and though I could use the primary camera to take pics and vids I could not get it to be the active camera for the mcode scanner. It still worked pretty well, though.

The ShotCode client has the same issue as the ConnexTo with the active camera on the K600i. I managed to scan a code to my blog, but it took a few tries. This might be due to the lower resolution on the secondary camera or maybe it just takes a few tries... The fact that I had the same camera issue with both clients may indicate I was doing something wrong, but I asked around and some friends say they have has similar problems with QR-code readers they install on their phones.