App Friday: Red Laser vs Barcode Scanner

Pokemon and the Game Boy are two examples of Japanese crazes which really caught on; pachinko and the Barcode Battler are two examples of ones which didn't. However, nearly two decades after the release of the Battler it seems that barcode scanning is back again.

Earlier this week MobileCrunch revealed that the Red Laser app (download link) has been in the top five of the App Store's paid app chart for the last three months -- and has got there purely by word of mouth.

We decided to check Red Laser out for ourselves to see what the fuss was all about. We also checked out a free app from the Android Market, the imaginatively named Barcode Scanner to see if there were any major differences between the two.

Recombu runs almost exclusively on caffeine, chocolate, computer games and fancy cheese as well as powerful graphic cards, so we thought we'd test out the barcode battlers on a few of our favourite things.

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