Using my phone for work (not as a phone)

Recently I purchased a brand new HTC Desire phone. It's like an iPhone but doesn't allow me to access Apple's iStore. The software in the phone is called Android and has been designed by Google. It's quite swish. HTC (and Telstra) have both modded the phone though so it now has some fancy HTC usability features (woo!) and some useless Telstra marketing things I can't get rid of (less woo).

Apart from being able to look up restaurants and know the weather at a glance, the phone has some interesting apps which I was able to download to help me at work. One of these apps is a barcode scanner that uses the camera to 'scan' the barcode. I can then transfer my scanned barcodes to my PC.

Now this may not sound that exciting to most people. But anyone who has had to fork out hundreds of dollars for a wireless barcode scanner can probably see where I'm heading with this.

Picture me standing in a bunker. The bunker contains a compactus. The compactus contains books. Some of these books have a barcode. Now, instead of me having to write down the barcodes of these books onto a piece of paper, and then typing them into a computer (or taking a laptop down there and typing them direct), I just whipped out my Desire, pressed 'barcode scanner' and merrily went scanning things. I still have to write down the numbers on books without a barcode (although I should look at some kind of OCR thing that would scan the printed numbers) but I'm still doing things a lot faster and more accurate than if I had to write/type these numbers into the system.

I love my phone...except that I linked it to my work email and now it bings at me every time I get one...I should undo that. Otherwise all good!