They may be right: it measures 11.2 x 3.7 x 3.0 inches and weighs less than 3.1 pounds. If there's a smaller one than the ScanSnap S300M around, I'm not aware of it. And it's feature packed as well as svelte. (Yes, there are pen scanners, but they certainly don't pack as much oomph as this baby.)

The ScanSnap S300M supports Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”) and offers fast (for a portable scanner) "one-touch" conversion of paper documents into PDF (portable document format) files. It can operate from USB connectivity when an outlet isn't available -- or from an AC power supply when one is.

The ScanSnap can scan paper documents, receipts, bills, invoices and business cards. It's the latter feature I find especially useful when I'm on the road. If I'm at a trade show, I normally collect dozens of business cards. Previously, I've had to manually enter the data into Address Book or carry the cards home for scanning. Now I can simply scan 'em in with the ScanSnap S300M in my hotel room using the bundled Cardiris software. Cardiris works well most of the time, but I find myself having to make manual corrections with about 20 percent of the cards I scan into the Mac OS X Address Book.

What's more, combine the Fujitsu scanner with optical character recognition (OCR) software such as DEVONthink Pro Office or READiris and you can do a whole lot more. To begin digitizing paper assets, you load a stack of up to 10 documents into the ADF and press the “SCAN” button to produce PDF files at speeds of up to eight double-sided pages per minute (ppm). The ScanSnap S300M comes bundled with scanning software, including (besides Cardiris) ScanSnap Manager for setting adjustments and ScanSnap Quick Menu for control of scanned documents.

The ScanSnap S300M doesn't come with the full version of Adobe Acrobat as do the more expensive scanners in the Fujitsu line; for the price, that's a reasonable trade-off. But with its features and compact size, it's a great mobile scanning solution for road warriors.

Macsimum rating: 8 out of 10.

"Macsimum News" is a proud supporter of [url=http://planetgumbo.org/]Planet Gumbo[/url], which feeds the hungry. We urge you to help them in their efforts.

Macsimum Media Partners: [url=http://www.appleheads.org/]AppleHeads[/url], [url=http://macosg.com/]MacOSG[/url], [url=http://macnightowl.com/]Mac Night Owl[/url], [url=www.setteb.it/]setteB.IT[/url], [url=http://www.macnotables.com/wordpress/]MacNotables[/url], [url=http://www.macvoices.com/wordpress/]MacVoices[/url], [url=http://www.macgeneration.com/]MacGeneration[/url]