On the heels of yesterday's news we bring you more from the realm of gadget convergence. Apparently, NEC and NAIST (Nara Institute of Science and Technology from Japan) have teamed together to bring high resolution scanners to cell phones.

Commuters in Japan already anger bookstore owners and newsagents by using existing cellphone software to try to take snapshots of newspaper and magazine articles to finish reading on the train to work.

This is only possible because some phones now offer very rudimentary optical character recognition (OCR) software which allows small amounts of text to be captured and digitised from images.

But with the new software entire documents can be captured. As a page is being scanned the OCR software takes dozens of still images of the page and effectively merges them together using the outline of the page as a reference guide. The software can also detect the curvature of the page and correct any distortion so caused, enabling even the areas near the binding to be scanned clearly.

Using the new software with a 1-megapixel camera held at least 20centimetres away, an A4 sized page takes about 3 to 5 seconds to scan. This produces between 21 and 35 images which the software merges together to extract the text and record any images.

This makes sense when used for sending documents and such, but stealing magazine's because you don't feel like buying them? That's lame. If anything replaces reading a magazine for me, it definitely won't be my cellphone.