Of all the magical things a smartphone can do, I rank business-card OCR among the highlights.

Think of it: Instead of manually transcribing each and every card into your phone or desktop address book, you simply snap a photo and presto: an app transcribes everything for you.

Shape’s Business Card Reader has been at this game for years; as far back as 2010, PC World’s Lex Friedman noted that it “worked with impressive accuracy.”

I’ll second that: After CES last January, I used BCR on a huge stack of cards, and it worked almost flawlessly—especially on cards with light backgrounds and dark text. Talk about five bucks well spent.

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