The evolution of gadgetry in recent years follows a general recognisable pattern: smaller, simpler, less clutter. It’s also a pattern largely ignored by the vast majority of scanners, and the reason why the Doxie Go WiFi is so appealing.
I have one of those all-in-one printers that prints, scans, and copies, and has built-in WiFi to do so wirelessly — except that the poor software actually requires scanning to be done over USB. Not the end of the world by any stretch, but certainly a mild annoyance that involves precariously balancing the iMac on the side of my desk and pulling cables to their tightest. So, yeah, a stretch.
For quite some time, I’ve been after a better scanning solution and in recent years I find myself less concerned about über-high quality: long gone are the days of scanning my film photographs or pencil drawings; now it’s (perhaps sadly) more about documents that need signing or the occasional rough sketch, and I want to do that in a nice and easy, clutter-free way.
The Doxie Go sits neatly under my iMac to the left of the base, with a tiny footprint about as deep as a business card. The buttons and ports are hidden away at the back and the design is pleasingly Apple-friendly, especially when compared to the standard (wired) Doxie model. Clearly the main appeal of the Doxie Go is that it can be used anywhere, and although I haven’t needed to take it anywhere yet, there’s no doubt that it’s the perfect scanner for those on the move.
I’ve also been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the scans. I hadn’t expected anything that great (because that’s what giant flat-bed scanners are for, right?), but the Doxie Go is capable of 600dpi scans and the quality is really rather good.
Set-up was painless and straightforward. The slightly — but only very slightly — more laborious task was the set-up of the Eye-Fi card using Eye-Fi’s software (in other words: this is not Doxie’s fault), which allows for the transfer of files over your local network.
One thing that is perhaps not immediately apparent from Apparent’s marketing (see what I did there?) is that both Doxie Go models are effectively wireless, since you scan to the device’s internal memory, a USB stick, or an SD card. The ‘WiFi’ part in the Doxie Go WiFi title is simply the Eye-Fi SD card it ships with. Something else that confused me was the mention of the cloud services. Whilst it’s true that you can upload to a variety of browser-based apps like Flickr or Evernote, you do that once the files are on your computer. Not a biggie, but if you’re expecting to get stuff on Flickr without any sort of interfacing between the scanner and a computer, you might be disappointed. Oh, and don’t forget that the Eye-Fi receiver will use up another precious USB port on your computer.
However, minor grips aside — and they really are only to do with the marketing or the third-party Eye-Fi card, not the scanner itself — the Doxie Go WiFi is a wonderful little bit of kit. It is small, it is simple, and (after initial set-up) there’s no need for any wires.
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