Doxie Go First Impressions

I got my Doxie Go in the mail this morning. I bought it last week from Amazon UK as soon as they went back on sale – the Doxie Go was apparently sold out worldwide for a few weeks. The model I bought isn’t the new Doxie Go + WiFi bundle, which is a clever way of selling a WiFi-enabled Doxie Go with the addition of an Eye-Fi wireless SD card. I plan on buying an Eye-Fi soon.

The device itself is tiny and elegant. It’s made of plastic, but it feels pretty solid and sturdy in hand. The Doxie Go is almost the same width of my MacBook Air keyboard – I don’t know yet if I’ll be able to fit this in my Tom Bihn Ristretto bag, but at least it comes with its own carrying bag that’s big enough to put an USB cable inside as well.

Setting up the Doxie is a relatively straightforward process: you have to charge the device the first time completely, wait for its batteries to reach 100%, and download the Mac desktop utility that you will use to import scanned images from the portable scanner. I haven’t really played with the Mac app – I just imported a few scans to see if it was working – but from what I’ve seen it seems relatively nice-looking and functional. One minor gripe I had with the initial setup is that the software tells you to “calibrate” the device first with a dedicated piece of paper, and I thought the Doxie would scan that as well. So I connected the Doxie, but the Doxie app wasn’t “seeing” the device, and the Finder showed an empty Doxie volume mounted in the sidebar. It turns out, the “calibrate” image doesn’t get scanned as the Doxie simply uses it to, well, actually calibrate itself. Now you know.

I’m playing with the Doxie right now and it’s pretty fast when you scan at 300 dpi. I look forward to going completely paperless and finding the right software setup for the job.

I’ll have a review of the Doxie Go on MacStories next week.