Doxie, the cute but functional document scanner, last made waves with its ability to send scanned items to Evernote, Dropbox, or your iPhone. That functionality was handy, but you still needed to dig out your Doxie scanner, attach it your PC or Mac, and then perform the scan. Doxie’s cutting the cord today with Doxie Go: a cordless self-contained scanner that saves scans to its internal memory. At your convenience, tether the scanner to your PC or Mac (or iOS device, with optional accessory kit) and transfer your scanned documents to your hard drive. This makes the scanner operate much more like a digital camera.
The internal memory stores about 600 pages of scanned documents. You can also scan directly to USB stick or SD card and completely avoid the need to connect the Doxie Go to an USB port. That’s the kind of innovation we like to see in this post-PC era!
Doxie Go is no speed demon, at about 8 seconds per page, but that’s a small concession for the convenience of quality scanning anywhere you happen to be. Doxie Go will produce a much better image than trying to snap a picture of a document with your iPhone. And the included Doxie 2.0 software now allows you to create searchable PDFs, which might be a handy feature.
Doxie Go packs a Lithium Ion battery good for about 100 scans per charge. It’ll charge over USB (while you’re syncing with your PC) in about two hours, or you can get the optional Doxie GoKit for $20, which includes a wall charger and international power plugs.
The cordless Doxie Go addresses one of the gripes I had when I reviewed the original Doxie scanner: the poor placement of the USB cable with respect to the flow of paper through the device. With Doxie Go, you can scan anywhere that’s convenient and attach the scanner to your PC anywhere that’s convenient because scanning and synchronizing are two separate tasks.
Scanners used to be all the rage, and now we take the task basically for granted due to the proliferation of all-in-one printer/fax/scanner monstrosities. It’s nice to see someone tackling the headaches of just scanning.
Doxie Go will set you back $199. It’s available for pre-order now, with the first units expected to ship mid-November.