I have owned the Nokia N95 for a few months now, and personally I think its a fantastic phone, it has its few problems here and there, but overall you couldn't ask for anything better for a phone right now.

I have known for a little while now of the barcode scanner on the phone, but after many attempts at trying to scan items found around my room, from Lynx bottles to photography magazines, and failing each time, I gave up trying to use it.

That was back at Christmas, and on a random trip around the phone last night I again came across the barcode scanner, but this time decided to google it and find out how it really works, and what I found really impressed me.

To start off with, I found I was trying to scan the wrong things, it turns out Nokia had created their own square barcodes, where you can encode URL's, messages and even phone numbers into the image. The N95 can then scan the image, and read the contents of the message. An example barcode can be found below.

To access the barcode scanner, from the Main Menu, you go into Office and then choose the Barcode Scanner. Once it has loaded and you have opened your camera lens, get the image inbetween the upper and lower red lines and then the phone should decode and show the message!

There are a few other phones that can also scan these barcodes, but currently not many, but if this kind of feature takes off then maybe in a few years these could replace business cards, or be a new feature on business cards where people can just scan and save your details without losing them.

I created my barcode using Nokia's tool here, and here is a nifty firefox plugin that enables you to generate the barcode for any page you are visiting.

Thanks for reading, Matt