Siemens Pocket Reader

The Pocket Reader is Siemens' offering in the OCR pen product category. The Siemens Pocket Reader takes in text line by line and interprets it immediately by optical character recognition.

A small LCD screen running the length of the device lets you inspect the scanned text for errors. Function keys scroll through the captured text. The memory is non-volatile, so if the batteries die or you want to change them, captured information is not lost.

The Pocket-Reader holds up to 40,000 characters, equal to about 20 pages of text. To scan text in, you hold the device as you would a pen and run it over the material to be captured.It captures one line at a time. A red laser illuminates while the device is working, and the small roller moves the reader smoothly over the page.

Once you get back to the office PC or a portable computer, simply plug the device in to an open serial port and download the text, pasting it into a word processor, e-mail template or any other text-accepting application.People who receive large quantities of printed materials but want to keep only small fragments will enjoy the PocketReader, especially if the documents are collected while traveling.