If you want to turn your BlackBerry Playbook’s camera into a PDF scanner, Handy Scanner has your solution. The app provides a straight forward service. Using the PlayBook camera, or image files already on your PlayBook, you can create PDFs with just a few steps.
The app isn’t perfect yet — it’s missing a few features that would make it a must-have. But for those seeking a quick solution, Handy Scanner makes it relatively easy. Using your PlayBook camera, you can snap multiple pictures and have them added to the same multi-page PDF.
Scanning documents, then, becomes a snap. As long as you have the right lighting for the camera, and can fit the page into the PlayBook camera’s viewfinder, you’ll have a nice and easy multipage PDF that you can then attach to email or load onto your computer. The same goes for image files already on your PlayBook. These turn into PDFs just as easily, though there’s obviously less of a need for this feature.
It works in the same manner, so you can create quick PDFs of those random images you’ve downloaded or captured with your camera. In her review of the app, CrackBerry’s Alicia Erlich notes one feature that I think this app needs to be a must-have: the ability to edit PDFs.
Sometimes you might want to snap more pages rather than fewer, just to make sure you have enough. But the app does not let you edit the PDF to remove pages. It also doesn’t let you crop some of the images, which is something it definitely needs.
Camera scanning is inexact and you’ll often have a hard time creating a perfect scan. The ability to crop images is pretty necessary. It would also be nice to edit text, but that’s a fairly advanced feature I’d expect from an app specifically designed for PDF editing.
Still, Handy Scanner gets the job done in a pinch. You can get Handy Scanner at App World for $2.99.
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