Point of Sale Information and News for January 2014

Hey isn’t this great? We’ve made a video of the DS4800 so you can see it in all its glory. And what a lot of glory.

Behold!

Man it’s fun to test out stuff before it’s available for public consumption. I feel fancy. Anyway, there’s a new Motorola scanner that was announced today, the DS4800, and I wanted to talk about it since that’s my job.

The DS4800 is a fancy pants 2D area imager. And most likely pretty spendy. I don’t know for sure yet, there’s no MSRP listed. But check the lines on this thing, really sleek, really smooth. It looks like a fancy phone. I think we were calling it the batwing when we were messing around with it.

For the trigger, instead of a button, the DS4800 uses a capacitive trigger system with haptic feedback, which is pretty fun to mess with. It cuts down on moving parts too, so it could be a little burly. But I don’t want to drop this thing at all.

Oh and the sounds. That’s a whole thing there. So you know how scanners make a beep tone when they scan? It’s usually a chip that chirps one of a few tones? Well the DS4800 ditches that for a speaker and the ability to play audio files. The first time you’ll notice is on power up, when it plays a gravitas-filled crescendo. And then successful scans come with a nice tone. However, this means that with 123scan, you can switch the tones to be whatever you want. Clearly many audio clips have licensing fees associated with them, but imagine the Star Trek teleporter sound on powerup and phaser noises during scanning. It’d be awesome!

I haven’t even gotten to performance yet. So it’s a 2D imager, it’s a bit different version than the Blockbuster they’ve been putting into their mobile computers and the DS6878 and DS9808. But it’s a great scan engine, with about a foot and a half depth of field on regular retail barcodes. The scanner can read off screens remarkably well, so mobile couponing or mobile ticketing would be no big deal.

Options are available with driver’s license parsing, so you could see the DS4800 as a credit card signup scanner, or maybe in admitting in hospitals, or age verification in fancy bars. The possibilities are limitless.

There are also customization options available at certain order thresholds. If you need a lot of scanners, like a whole lot, Motorola can customize your DS4800 fleet to match whatever you want. Want to slap your brand logo on it? They can do it! Want the scanner to shout “Woo hoo!” on successful scan right out of the box? Done and done. There are a ton of potentialities here, and it’s terrific.

Once pricing is squared away, I’m sure these things will fly off the shelf. It’s very much a new era in data capture, and it’s great to see manufacturers shifting away from the same design that’s been in use for 20 some years. You can learn more about the scanner at Motorola as well.