Mike's NBC-TV stories

Turn your smartphone into a scanner

Some of the most popular apps these days have nothing to do with having food delivered, connecting with others via social media, or even playing games.

They’re apps that allow you to turn your smartphone or tablet into a document scanner, and PC Mike Wendland talks about the three most popular this week.

Scanner Pro is the second most popular business app in the App Store. It scans any papers, ranging from a receipt to multi-page documents. Scanned documents can then be emailed, exported to Photos, uploaded to the cloud, saved on your device, printed or even faxed. Advanced color processing makes your scans as readable as possible. The app is $3.99 for iOS.

Tiny Scanner has the ability to scan in color, grayscale, or black and white, along with five levels of contrast for crisp monochrome text. Scanned images are stored as PDFs and can be easily emailed, stored in the cloud – or faxed. The app is free for iOS and Android with premium features available for purchase.

TurboScan Pro turns your smartphone or tablet into a full-featured and powerful scanner for documents, receipts, books, photos, whiteboards, and other text. It scans multipage documents in your choice of image format and sends them anywhere. The app is $5.99 for iOS and $4.99 for Android.

Mike is a veteran journalist whose video "PC Mike" reports have been distributed weekly to all 215 NBC-TV stations since 1994, making him one of the most experienced tech reporters in the country. His tech stories and videos have appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, the Today Show, The New York Times, USA Today and in numerous national newspapers and magazines. In addition to the PC Mike tech blog, he also publishes the Roadtreking.com RV Travel Blog in which he travels North America in an RV reporting about interesting people and places.