Mon, 22 Aug 2011 TextGrabber for iPhone review
ABBYY has brought its optical character recognition software to the iPhone
- Manufacturer: ABBYY
- Pros: Affordable, fast and accurate optical character recognition app
- Cons: Doesn’t work on the iPad
- Price: £1.19
- Star rating:

TextGrabber can use the iPhone’s camera to take pictures of text in documents such as books, magazines or catalogues. It can then read the text in the photo and convert it into a text file that it stores on the iPhone. You can edit the text using the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard, perform a search for related info on the internet, email it to a friend or colleague, or copy and paste it into other apps such as Pages.
The app is easy to use; simply tap to focus the camera and then take the picture. You need to hold the iPhone reasonably close to the document you’re photographing, but as long as you can read the text on the iPhone screen then the app should be able to scan it. Once the photo has been taken you can crop it to remove any pictures or stray bits of text that you don’t want to include, then press the Read button to start scanning the text.
We found TextGrabber’s OCR function to be both quick and accurate. As long as the photo is clear enough then the app was over 95 per cent accurate, with only the occasional spelling mistake here and there. It can even handle text in around 60 languages. Our only real complaint is that the app isn’t iPad compatible – ABBYY told us this is because the iPad’s camera isn’t good enough to capture text accurately.

TextGrabber provides fast, accurate OCR for your iPhone
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