Windows Phone Thoughts: Coming Somewhat Soon: Use Any Cameraphone As A Scanner

"New software, developed by NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in Japan, goes further than existing cellphone camera technology by allowing entire documents to be scanned simply by sweeping the phone across the page. Commuters in Japan already anger bookstore owners and newsagents by using existing cellphone software to try to take snapshots of newspaper and magazine articles to finish reading on the train to work. This is only possible because some phones now offer very rudimentary optical character recognition (OCR) software which allows small amounts of text to be captured and digitised from images. But with the new software entire documents can be captured."

While the manufacturers of this new software don't plan on releasing it for 3 years, this does look like a nice feature when it eventually hits (Even if newspaper & magazine sales suffer). I've often had a document that I've wanted to scan, and haven't been near my trusty Canoscan to do the deed. With this I wouldn't have to resort to deciphering my handwriting later (the human equiviliant of OCR)! This software sounds great to me, but I have a hunch those security-minded individuals amoung you will not have such a happy view on this software... ;)