Snap Razor-Sharp Business Cards with Evernote and Clarifi

November 18th, 2008

I love using Evernote to remember business cards.

Before starting with Evernote, I don’t think I’d successfully used a business card. I mean, I’d never actually found someone’s contact information by digging a business card from the alpine masses of indiscriminate paper which accumulate in and around my various desks, backpacks and pockets. Not any more; with Evernote, I immediately snap any business card that I want to remember with the closest camera at hand (usually my phone or laptop webcam), and rest easy knowing that I’ll always be able to find it instantly from any phone or computer.

[Clarifi demo video]

One big nuisance: the camera on the iPhone, my current cellphone of choice, is not very good at taking pictures of close-up objects. To use the iPhone for business cards, you have to get pretty proficient at holding the card very steady and at arm’s length, and even then the results are sometimes disappointing.

Griffin has completely solved this problem with their new Clarifi case for the iPhone 3G. In a three word review: it’s amazingly great.

The Clarifi fits snugly over your iPhone and comes with a little sliding macro lens letting you take clear close-up shot of business cards, receipts and anything else you can think of (I can only think of business cards and receipts). Here’s an example before and after photo of a hand-held business card:

clarifibizcard
I’ve been using the Clarifi case for a couple of weeks now and the only time I temporarily took my iPhone out of it was to film the demo movie at the top of this post.

The case is $35 direct from Griffin. If you buy it from the links on this page, Evernote gets a small affiliate commission, so please consider buying one for everyone in your family or town.