Barcode Scanner

Pretty self-explanatory. You can scan bar codes from most of the items you find in a supermarket. Just point the camera at the item and fit the bar code in the viewfinder rectangle drawn on the screen to scan it. After the application reads the bar code you can do a “Product search” on Google products or a simple web search. You'll be surprised to see how many thing you can find out. This is for the 1D code.

The really cool thing that this little app can do is read the 2D codes, or QR codes. These codes, created by a Japanese corporation in 1994, can store a much broader range of data then the simple 1D bar code but they are mostly used for encoding URLs. This enables you to point to a code -> take a picture -> visit the website, all this without having to manually enter the usually too long URL.

Most apps that are available on the Android Market have a picture like this on their developer's web page that enables you to just point at the code on the computer screen and the browser from you mobile automatically redirects to that Android Market location.

The other neat feature of this app is that you can share data by displaying a bar code on your mobile's screen and scan it with another mobile phone. For example you can convert a contact, a bookmark, an application or the contents of the clipboard to a 2D bar code and share it with another phone using this application.

More information about the Barcode Scanner on the developer's Web page: http://code.google.com/p/zxing/