Scanners And Terminals With Android Offer New Services

It’s easy to argument that using smartphone for mobile self-scanning is the way to go. They’re bought and maintained by customers and are technologically evolving at an extremely fast pace. But there are situations where using good old scanners – or “personal shoppers” – may be the way to go. For example in B2B retail, where customers don’t want to use their personal smartphones, or when you need to offer specialized content that you don’t want to release on the app store, like floor plans.

Offering instant visible feedback on a display is an advantage hard to beat, so companies tinkered around and found a solution: Combining scanners and the touchscreen of smartphones – including the underlying operating system Android.

One of those companies is Zebra with it’s MC18 Personal Shopper. They even offer a version running Windows Embedded Compact 7. We instantly partnered with Zebra and are now able to offer the snabble services on the MC18 as well.

Another interesting piece of hardware we spotted at EuroCIS trade fair back in February comes from First Data TeleCash, and it comes in different flavors: Clover. These terminals are meant for smaller businesses which aren’t looking for large pos systems but a simple solution to actually do what they want to do and let clover care about the business side of their business.

Clover looks like an interesting counterpart to snabble as well. The clover devices can not only run Android apps, but they can be constantly online and interact with smartphones running other apps, like snabble. This offers interesting perspectives on how a customer checks out of a store and on how a pos/register can look and act like.