Admit it - QR codes are useful. And cool. They allow you to instantly get any bit of information, most frequently browser or Market urls, onto your phone - all you have to do is download the Barcode Scanner app from the Market (or any other QR reader) and scan the QR image.

But What About Chrome2Phone?

Chrome2Phone (or FoxToPhone) aims to make it even easier to pass information like this around but consider this:

  • Chrome2Phone functionality is only available on phones running Froyo, which means some phones will never receive it. In fact, only about 28.7% of all phones are running Froyo at the moment
  • you need to install a browser extension and pair it with your phone, which means when you need to get a link on your friend's computer, you're out of luck
  • only single such pairing is supported from what I've seen, so if you have more than 1 phone, you are out of luck again

Now, we try to bring you clickable and scannable QR codes every time we post Market apps - if you're on your mobile, just click, and if you're on your desktop, just scan. Sometimes we may forget, sometimes too many QR codes would pollute an otherwise clean post, and sometimes you may just want to grab a link that just leads to a referenced article.

Dynamic QR Codes On AndroidPolice.com

With all of the above in mind, I spent some of last week coding up dynamic QR codes.

They are not visible until you need them, but when you do, just hover on any in-post link for a few seconds and unless it's already a QR code or an image, you should see the QR code for that link pop up, ready to be scanned. For those confused by this behavior, I've added a bit of text explaining what's going on.

Demo Time!

You can see how it all works in the image below or by hovering on these sample links:

Go ahead, try them - just put your mouse cursor on top of the links and pause for a few seconds.

Note: these hover-on codes only work for in-post links - I deliberately didn't enable them for every link on the site to avoid possible annoyance.

Do you like this new addition to Android Police? Please let me know in the poll below. If you have any bug reports, suggestions, or other feedback, don't hesitate to leave a comment below.

Thanks, everyone!