Originally Posted by blort

I can't help you from an app perspective, but there are plenty of devices available that will scan barcodes, save them internally, and allow you to dump the contents to a computer. See, for example:

http://www.barcodesinc.com/metrologic/scanpal2.htm

It would be cheaper to just stick a laptop on a cart and buy a barcode scanner that doesn't have its own memory, but certainly less convenient. I used these ages ago with a keyboard "wedge" interface, but it looks like USB is common now.

A middle option might be finding a battery-powered barcode scanner with a Bluetooth interface and pairing it with an iPhone or any cheap PDA. Then you could just move the text file it generates to your inventory system when you're done scanning.

As you can imagine, this is something that stores have been doing for a very long time, so fortunately you're not asking for anything novel. Some questions I would have for an iPhone-based solution would be how quickly does it scan, how accurate is it, how sensitive is it, and does the design make it comfortable for somebody to use it repetitively for a thousand scans?