ShopSavvy for Windows Phone 7 released but without live scanning

News · 24 Dec 2010 · MTW Editorial Team

After initially being developed for Windows Mobile 6.5 and never seeing the light of the day the guys at Big in Japan decided to jump into the Windows Phone 7 bandwagon and port their application over to the new OS. It is now finally out in the Marketplace but unfortunately an important feature had to be cut out: Live Scanning. Here’s how it went down according to the developers:

After much wrangling and negotiating with Microsoft they have decided to release our app WITHOUT live scanning for the time being. They have their own ‘tag’ app that uses live scanning and I think they want to give it a headstart before allowing ShopSavvy to go full-on live. Anyway, the app looks pretty cool (full on metro styling) and will give you the same results that the iPhone and Android versions provide. It is definitely a 1.0 version – i.e. not 4.0 (like iPhone and soon Android), but it is a good start. You can download it now from the Marketplace.

Third-party developers don’t have access to the raw camera feed so developing a live codebar scanning application or anything that has to use the camera feed is curently impossible on Windows Phone 7. From the wording above it seems that the developers decided to bypass this and ”hack” their way around this restriction probably by doing something similar to K.Marshall’s hack (ironically Kevin has also released a sample barcode scanning test app today that use sthe same zxing code bar generator as the ShopSavvy application) but this probably didn’t pass certification so there’s no more live scanning in there for now. As of right now there are only 2  applications that have access the raw camera feed on Windows Phone 7 and both are developed by LG: Panorama and Scansearch (Microsoft TAG app on WP7 doesn’t do live scanning). As I have mentioned a few days ago the regular version of Scansearch doesn’t support barcode scanning but the version that gets installed on the LG GW910 developer handset does have it. You can grab ShopSavvy for free the Marketplace right now.