Scanbot

I've got a big old honking Canon scanner sitting on my desk. This is the device that replaced the 1980's fax machine. But it eats up valuable real estate and is somewhat of a pain to use. And I just found an incredible higher tech replacement for just 99¢!

Scanbot is a new scanning app that turns your iPhone into an incredible scanning tool. Doesn't matter if you are scanning an airport receipt or a 20 page legal document, Scanbot handles it with incredible ease. Just lay the document down on a flat surface and Scanbot will give you directions to get the perfect scan. Once Scanbot sees that your phone is aligned with the document, it automatically takes a photo and your scan is turned into a PDF.

Scanbot is now available in the App Store. Anyone want to buy a Canon desktop, flat-bed scanner?

Best Quality Cell Phone Calls Ever

You have to try this. The sound is extraordinary.

Face it...the quality of calls made over cellular networks sucks compared to landlines....until now. Yesterday, I just discovered the holy grail....phone calls made from my mobile phone that are actually higher in quality than landline calls.

If you have an Android phone, you can stop reading now. This little gem is for people living within Apple's wonderful, walled-in garden. Yes, the higher primates known as iPhone users. Specifically, it's for people living in the garden that are wearing iOS 7.

The feature is called FaceTime Audio. And no, you do not need to make a video call to use it. It's strictly an audio-only call. The quality of the call is made possible by VoIP...Voice over Internet Protocol. It's a telephone call made over the Internet instead of the public switched cellular networks.

Here's how you use it. Go into your contacts list and pull up the name of the person you want to call. In the example from the photo above, that's our buddy Lauren. If you scroll down about 2/3 of the way on her contact page, you see an option called FaceTime. To the right are two icons. The camera icon let's you make a FaceTime video call, while the phone icon lets you make a FaceTime audio call.

Press the phone icon next to FaceTime and in no time at all, you will experience the highest quality phone conversation you have ever heard. It's almost surreal. Once you do this, you will likely never use cellular as your primary calling method. And there's an added bonus. If you make the call when connected to WiFi, the calls do not count against your bucket of data. FaceTime audio! Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

QuizUp

I'm a hard-core console gamer, so most iPhone games hold little allure for me. The ones I do have on my phone tend to be fast...the kind that let you occupy a few seconds while you are waiting in the doctor's office or check-out line at Costco.

Bookworm has been a favorite iPhone game of mine. There are 49 letters in a grid and you form as many different words as you can. What I like is that the game saves your progress, so you can jump in and out at will. Sometimes a game will last two weeks for me....stealing 30 seconds here to play and maybe 45 seconds the next day.

When I play my Xbox One, I prefer to play against carbon-based opponents. Artificial Intelligence doesn't hold a candle to the human brain, so it makes the game a lot more challenging going head-to-head with a human. Now I've stumbled across an iPhone game that lets me do the same, yet also meets my requirement of being short so that I can jump in and out at will.

It's a free game called QuizUp. It's a fascinating trivia game that let's you choose the Trivia Topic. Once you do, it throws you into a match with another person in some other random part of the world. Each match consists of six rounds...six questions, actually. Your score is determined by how many of the six trivia questions you get correct....and how fast you answer. The match goes to the smartest and swiftest.

The beauty is that a match rarely lasts more than 30 seconds. Then you can just bow out or ask for a rematch or go find a new opponent. There are over 250 trivia topics, so the scope of the game is huge. It's fun, fast and never gets boring....and it has carbon-based opponents! That's a lot better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

You can just play random opponents or build up a list of friends to play against. If you want to go head-to-head against me, my gamertag is grogs (from Minnesota). You can check the game out here: https://www.quizup.com. Then go download it for free in the App Store.