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doxie go goes from awesome to meh


I purchased a Doxie Go with Eye-fi Connect X2 SD card in November of 2012. The Doxie Go is a small, usb rechargeable document scanner with an SD card slot in the back. As the scanner saves files to the SD card, the Eye-fi SD card pushes the files to web services like Evernote, Flickr and others via wifi. The Eye-fi card enables a user to add wifi-support to existing devices, like the Doxie, cameras, and other devices that use an SD card.




Imagine being able to scan documents and have them go directly to a cloud service, without having to receive them through your computer and then push them out to the cloud.

We've been able to scan probably close to a thousand documents with Doxie in the last couple of years. Our workflow was pretty simple. We kept the Doxie on the counter in the kitchen.

- Open mail
- Power on Doxie
- Feed the document through
- Put the document into the recycling bin

We had the Eye-fi configured to push directly to Evernote. You could pull up the iOS Evernote app and look at any bills, receipts or other documents that were scanned, or search via the OCR that Evernote applies to the documents you upload. It really was great. Super simple and quick. Lifehacker also thought this was a great thing to have.

Imagine my interest when I received this email from Eye-fi on November 10th, 2014:
A few days earlier I had noticed that scans with the Doxie weren't showing up in Evernote. I had stopped scanning and planned to try to debug the issue.

Turns out that Eye-fi is discontinuing the support for pushing to Evernote and recommends that you to purchase a new card and then pay $49.99/yr (USD) for the eyefi cloud service.

I'm a pretty tech savvy guy but even I wasn't aware that the Eye-fi card wasn't pushing directly to Evernote. Apparently it was pushing to an Eye-fi cloud service which would then push to Evernote. I also wasn't aware that this was something that they could discontinue. Purchasing the Eye-fi card was predicated on being able to push to Evernote and other cloud services and I had no idea that this was a potentially temporary thing that I was buying into. I would probably have still bought it but at least I wouldn't have felt like the rug was pulled out from under me.

I'm not the only one surprised to see this change.

It looked like there might be light at the end of the tunnel though. It would mean upgrading to a new Doxie Go with wifi at some expense but the newer Doxie has much better battery life and can be powered entirely off of the usb charger (the Doxie Go charges via usb but if you scan a lot of documents you can run down its built-in battery pretty quickly). And it has wifi built in!

Unfortunately it looks like Doxie themselves are missing the opportunity of being able to scan directly to the cloud that I and others found so convenient. Sent them a question and while they responded promptly, which is cool, they confirmed that you cannot scan directly to the cloud with the new wifi Doxie.


Scanning directly to Evernote worked great for me. Maybe this is trying to highlight the positives of a document scanning workflow that goes through a computer.

I'll be looking for some way to scan directly to Evernote again. I'm not sure that I want to encourage Eye-fi's bad behavior by purchasing one of their new 'Mobi' cards and their yearly service. I'll might also try to reduce paper by switching even more bills and mailings to electronic delivery. At this point it looks like the Doxie is going to end up in the trash.


2015/04/24 Update:
Since losing the Doxie I've found another approach that is working well. The Evernote smartphone application can store notes to your Evernote account from images taken from your smartphone. Now I end up laying them out on the counter and snapping photos of them from inside of the Evernote application.

Sometimes the documents don't lay flat, a problem you don't have with a scanner like Doxie, so you end up with slightly distorted but completely readable documents. I do wish the Evernote app would use the borders of the document to perform a transform on the document to flatten it out. This might be a potential future improvement, or they've tried and the result isn't better than doing nothing.
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