This normal-looking mouse is much more than meets the eye – it also doubles as a scanner. The IRIScan mouse works like a regular mouse, but it also features an extra button that lets it scan whatever is under it at the time. Press the “scan” button and swipe the mouse over a contract, letter, picture or other important document, and the image of that object appears immediately on the screen.

You can drag and drop the scanned document into your favorite program to edit it, send it or post it. The combination mouse and 300 dpi scanner costs $79 and comes with a three-month subscription to Evernote Premium.

The very cool combination device would undoubtedly be useful, but we’d worry about accidentally hitting that “scan” button over and over and ending up with hundreds of scans of our Spongebob mouse pad.

The post Point and Pick: Mouse Can Scan With the Push of a Button first appeared on Gajitz.

In spy movies, someone always has a cool gadget like a pen that takes secret pictures of classified documents. The same technology is now available to regular people in the form of the Pen Sized Scanner from Hammacher Schlemmer. The $125 gadget is a working ballpoint pen, but with a twist of a dial it switches functions to a covert scanner.

When you want to catch a sneaky picture of a document or other piece of information, you just press the shutter button halfway down to project a cool laser frame onto the target. Press the button the rest of the way and the five-megapixel camera snaps the image, which is then stored on the 1GB internal memory. An internal USB plug is revealed when you twist the pen apart, allowing for direct downloading to your computer and, presumably, letting you email secrets to your CIA handler.

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This simple piece of folding cardboard with magnets attached is actually much more useful than you might think. It’s called Scanbox, and it turns your smartphone into a portable scanner, photocopier and presentation tool.

The Scanbox folds nearly completely flat when not in use. When you need it, it unfolds to full size in a matter of seconds. Your documents, pictures or even 3D objects go inside the box’s opening. You then place your smartphone on top of it, activating the camera to scan whatever is inside.

With the premium Scanbox product, a set of LED lights stuck inside the box can remove any shadows. The team behind the Scanbox Kickstarter project raised the $12,500 they needed for their first production run with nearly two months to spare, meaning that this very clever product will soon go into production.

The post Flat-Pack Cardboard Box Turns any iPhone into a Scanner first appeared on Gajitz.

If you haven’t quite adopted the whole digital books lifestyle yet but find yourself in need of digital copies of a few pages now and then, the Scan Board concept is kind of a cool idea. Designed by Jo Jae-Hwan and Shin Se-Hwa, the Scan Board works a lot like other portable hand-held scanners, but with one notable difference: it fits in between the pages of a closed book. The glass plate is laid on top of the page that needs to be scanned and then the book is closed.

After pushing the button located in the non-scanning black edge of the device, the user just sits back and waits for a digital copy of the needed page. The data is then transferred to the user’s computer via a USB cable. Overall, the slick-looking design could use a little more refinement before it’s ready to be a fixture in every book lover’s home…but the fun idea and gorgeous styling definitely leave us wanting to see more.

The post Slick Scanner Concept Takes Things One Page at a Time first appeared on Gajitz.