Office Lens, a popular scanning app for Windows Phone devices, is now being released for iOS and Android devices.
Microsoft released a preview of Office Lens for Android in the Google Play Store, while also releasing the app for download in the Apple App Store.
Similar to the version of the app for Windows Phone, Office Lens for both iOS and Android are completely free.
"Office Lens is like having a scanner in your pocket," the download page for the app says on iTunes.
The Office Lens app allows users to snap pictures of things such as business cards, receipts, whiteboards, sticky notes and restaurant menus, among many others, which the app then uploads to Microsoft's OneNote.
OneNote is Microsoft's app for taking notes and is also free to download, available for Windows PCs, Windows Phone, Android and iOS, along with being used online.
When a user takes a picture using Office Lens, the image is automatically cropped, enhanced and cleaned up. Users can then search for certain words in the image through a built-in optical character recognition system.
Another very useful feature of Office Lens is that the images that the app takes can be converted into documents in Word and Powerpoint formats, or even in the PDF format.
The functionalities of the Office Lens app are basically the same across all of its versions in the various operating systems that support it. However, there are some features that are not in the iOS version that are included in the Android and Windows Phone versions, including the auto classifier function and the ability for capturing several images and saving them all at once. In addition, the iOS version of Office Lens does not include the business card mode, but the app can still detect business cards on the service side to be processed as such and generate files in the VCF format.
A representative for Microsoft, however, has revealed that the company is looking to standardize all the features across all the versions of Office Lens in the future, though there was no issued definite target time for the development.
The Android version of Office Lens, however, is still in a beta preview stage. Users that are looking to download a copy of the app should be members of the Google+ community and will have to volunteer to become a tester for Office Lens before being allowed to download the app from the Google Play Store.
