I have one of Doxie’s neat candybar-shaped paper scanners, and it’s great for getting through piles of paper. I can scan bills, flyers, photos and even whole books – I ripped all the pages from a beloved but falling-apart cookbook and scanned the pages one at a time to make a PDF.

But for anything less sheet-shaped, it’s useless. And often the next best option – your iPhone’s camera – isn’t much better. You have to focus it, hold it steady, and somehow wedge the pages of your Moleskine notebook open with one hand while lining up your scanning app with the other

That’s the slot that Doxie’s Flip wants to fill. It anything that’s not a big sheet of paper. Although it can kinda do that too.

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Doxie has filled a gap in the market with its new Flip, an oddball flatbed scanner that has a see-through bottom so you can flip it over and scan anything, even the wallpaper or carpet. It works a lot like a book-sized piece of electronic tracing paper.

Gone are the days when you absolutely needed a scanner to deal with document scanning. With the emergence of smartphones, we’ve seen a ton of new applications hit the market that allow you to do things that were unheard of before. Scanning documents is one of those things – and Prizmo 2 is just one of the apps that gives you that ability.

If you don’t have an app that handles scanning right from your phone, then now would be the time to take advantage of the pricing at Cult of Mac Deals. Because Prizmo 2 is only $24.99 during this limited time offer.

Office Drop is kind of like a mission-specific Dropbox. It comes with Mac and iOS clients, and lets you upload and share your various documents between them. However, it has one big stinking extra which could be amazingly useful to some people: It performs automatic OCR (optical character recognition) on your stored documents.

If you have a huge stack of old negatives or slides, your best bet is to send them off to India. Seriously: there are services which will scan all your negs, let you choose which ones you actually want to keep via a web browser and then get the digital files returned to you. Apparently it’s pretty cheap.

Or you could do it yourself, with the iPICS2GO Negative to iPhone Scanner. It’s a black box which uses your iPhone 4/S’s camera to snap photos of your own old film and then feeds them into software to produce the photos

If there was ever a company mired in Microsoftian corporate nonsense, it’s IRIS, the scanning and OCR company. Clunky, ugly and ridiculously overpriced software combined with hideous hardware, and a lame bird-based logo to boot – if IRIS were a human, it would be a taste-free middle-manager from the early 1990s.

The latest example is the IRIScan Book 2, a scanner which you have to drag over each sheet of paper by hand in order to digitize the letters thereon.

I never thought I’d get excited about boring credit cards, but Geode is an incredibly neat little kit which turns your iPhone into a payment system that can be used anywhere. And not some fancy NFC-style POS terminals, either. The Geode works anywhere you can use a regular credit card.

Some bits and bobs of tech just never seem to go away entirely no matter how much tech you own, and just as you always need to have a printer around for that rare printout, there’s always a need to have access to a scanner to digitize the stray scrap of paper or mottled receipt.

With so many people now ditching their laptops for iPads, the iConvert aims to fill a niche. Featyring a front feeder adjustable from between 2- and 8.5-inches wide, the iConvert can scan almost anything normal sized you throw at it, and digitize them directly to your iPad’s picture folder as 300 DPIs.

Pretty swank for the mobile road warrior looking to keep his portfolio of documents as svelte as his iPad 2. Couple this with an OCR app, you’re all set. $150 when it goes on sale in February, courtesy of Brookstone.

An inside source at Apple has told 9to5Mac that the company is working on a native scanner app for iOS. The app in question would turn the iPhone or iPad into a digital scanner. As Apple increases the quality of its mobile cameras, such an app will give customers a native solution for scanning on the go.

Apple’s had patents float through the USPTO, hinting that they were working on a new technology that could let you just swipe a future iPhone’s display over a document to scan it and translate it into OCR text. Now a new patent has emerged, and it fits another piece into the puzzle.