One of the great promises of newer technology is increased mobility and there are a lot of gadgets out there that can fulfill that promise. Of course the mobile phone and the lap top computer are examples of these kinds of gadgets. In fact, with the combination of a lap top computer and a mobile phone, it's now possible to have an office where you can get work done just about anywhere. This includes the airport, your living room, your bedroom, the local park, your car, a picnic table in a campground somewhere, the PTA meeting at your kid's school, the bathroom, and any number of places that may be appropriate or less than appropriate to conduct business. The technology for setting up shop just about anywhere has been around since the nineteen eighties, but that mobile office has traditionally been rather limited. For example, just because you can talk on the phone, that didn't mean that you could send or receive faxes or email, or surf the web to do research. For a long time it also wasn't possible to print out customer invoices or other documents, although that changed with the invention of portable computer printers back in the nineteen nineties.
The ability to correspond with people through email and fax, as well as doing research, in a greater variety of settings expanded with the increase in number of wireless hot spots throughout the country. That still generally doesn't extend to parks and campgrounds, but there's now an excellent chance that you can get that kind of work done in the airport, at the PTA meeting, a coffee shop, or anywhere in your own home if those places have wireless routers within reach.
7 Inch Car Monitor
So now, just to recap, the modern mobile office consists of a mobile phone, a lap top computer, a portable printer, and depending on where you are you might even have access to the Internet. However, one piece of the standard office is till missing: the scanner.
Scanners are incredibly useful for getting document that are on a sheet of paper into your computer where they can then be manipulated or archived. For example, say you make house calls for your business and your office also happens to be your car. If your printer happens to be down, you might have to write out an invoice for your customer. You need to have your own copy too, but you have better things to do with your time than copying the invoice by hand. This is clearly a situation where a scanner would be useful, but how do you fit one in your car and how to you power it off of the car's battery?
Now there's a solution to problems like this in the from of a pocket sized scanner. It's called the Planon Docupen RC800, and it looks a lot like a pen. It's basically a cylinder about as long as a standard sheet of copier paper is wide and you scan by rolling the Docupen along the picture or document that you want to scan. Its memory is expandable up to 256 MB and you can vary the quality of the scans as well as tell it to scan in color or black and white. It even converts scanned text into editable text using Optical Character Recognition technology. In all this is the solution to having a fully portable office!