Atiz Scandock for iOS and Android review

 

The Atiz Scandock is a decent flatbed scanner replacement let down by an inflated price tag and space-draining size.

Pros:

Sleek looking design, general scanning quality is good, smartphone applications are fairly intuitive

Cons:

Takes up a lot of space, doesn't work in bright light, expensive

Overall Rating:

Price: $499
Manufacturer: Atiz

The Atiz Scandock is a nifty bit of technology designed to let small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) save money by turning employees' Android and iOS smartphones into mobile scanners. The Scandock does this using a custom docking port, where users can insert their phone and scan away hassle free.
Design and build
Taking the Scandock out of its box the first thing we noticed is it's fairly large size, being 450x380mm wide and deep, and 520mm tall. This means the dock will take up to half a standard size desk. However, despite being larger than we expected the dock looks fairly slick, with its curved aluminium form making it look a little bit like a piece of Star Trek tech.
The central plastic dock that actually houses the phone being used to scan documents has multiple heads, with one being designed for Apple's sleek iPhone 5 and the other a general larger dock designed to take the less uniform Android ecosystem.
The iPhone dock is the better of the two, being tailor made to snugly hold the smartphone. The Android dock by comparison is much larger, being designed to take multiple phone sizes. This means that unlike the iPhone dock, which locks the phone in place, Android handsets are only placed loosely into the scanner dock.

Scanning

To actually scan items, users will be required to install Atiz's Scandock app. The app is free on the Google Play and Apple app stores. One qualm we had with the app is the lack of a full user guide explaining the various modes and options. A printed user guide comes with the dock but only really tells you how to physically set up the scanner rather than use the main application.

Luckily both the iOS and Android apps are fairly user friendly and feature identical user interfaces. The green scanner icon jumps you to the main scanning page and the gear icon takes you to settings. Once in the scanning menu, the app offers you several options letting you launch individual or multiple scans - meaning if scanning a document, you can save multiple pages.

Testing the device using a Galaxy S4 and iPhone 5, the Scandock scanned images reasonably fast. The initial image was captured moments after we pressed the scan button, with it then taking a few seconds to process it and turn it into a PDF file. Our only issue scanning multiple pages using the Scandock was that its Flat Mat is slightly too sticky and made it fairly difficult to swap pages, requiring us to carefully peel each page off when finished.

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