Whilst I admire your cynisism, for me this is potentially quite a useful
feature.

Yes, I do find the business card scanning "cool", unique and clever but
since my mobile phone use is not demanding and the most important thing
to me about a mobile is that I can dial a number with it, I can afford
to indulge that whim occasionally. If the "cool" features turn out to be
of no benefit, therefore, I don't suffer from having discarded some
other feature - I can still make calls with the phone, which is the
important thing.

After about 5 years of using the cheapest no-frills phones I could find,
hand-me-downs from mates for free or a tenner when I lost or broke the
previous one, I heard acquaintances boasting of being given  "free" and
very snazzy phones to stay with their carriers and figured I might as
well jump on the bandwagon. A couple of my recent mobiles have therefore
been subsidised by my contract, each a few months after the last one
ended, and I haven't paid more to stay with the provider I've been with
for years than I would have by getting the phone with a contract from
another provider. In other words, I haven't been inconvenienced by this
indulgence, and I don't find £40 for a phone to be an extravagence (the
£150 or so I paid for my XDA IIi was, perhaps - what a useless piece of
crap! But that's another matter.)

Defensive, aren't I?
Methinks I protest too much!

Anyway, I've yet to find a phone with an addressbook that is easier to
use than scribbling the name & number on a piece of paper (which I will
lose c 50% of the time), so any improvement has to be worth a shot.
Entering a phone number in the addressbook is about 10 keypresses, but
using the typical numeric keypad in which the 1 button maps to ABC,
entering the name is quite a few more; because I already have a "Dave"
in my addressbook I must always add a surname, profession ("Dave
Plumber"), or whatever. Because I'm self-employed and the nature of my
business, most of the people I want to add to my addressbook do have
business cards - adding name, mobile & landline numbers with mere
"capture" and "process" button-presses could save me quite a bit of key
entry (especially on those occasions when I find myself recieving a
number of cards that I'd like to have in my addressbook). I find
searching an addressbook for Dave's landline number and adding his
mobile number to that addressbook entry to be slightly clumsy but this
is better than having two separate entries for him; so having the OCR
feature capture the whole lot at once and adding in company name & email
address is quite appealing.

The P990 arrived on Tuesday, I think, and it's early days yet to say
whether this feature will live up to its promise (or "hype" if you
prefer). Scanning a couple of cards here it has resolved the numbers
perfectly but is a bit more hit & miss on name, company name, address &
email. So I have mixed feelings right now & will have to see whether
these inaccuracies are due to the font & its size used on these
particular cards.

Stroller.