Gadgets With the Write Stuff
dan tynan on Jun 12 2008 at 12:09 pm | Filed under: Gadgets, PC World, Reviews
A handful of tools attempt to turn the humble ink pen into a digital recording device–with varying degrees of success.
(This post originally appeared in PC World magazine.)
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed a terrible case of CRS (can’t remember stuff). I can’t tell you how many times my lovely but increasingly frustrated wife has informed me that “I told you that yesterday” (since, obviously, I can’t remember).
Soon, though, I may not have to remember anything. Thanks to breakthroughs in storage and miniaturization, it may soon be possible for us to record every waking moment of our lives, store the data, search it, and replay the bits we need. Already a fairly ancient analog recording device–the ink pen–has undergone a transformation that enables it to turn your doodles into digits for editing and storage.
Pen Testing
There are really two kinds of digital pen. One, typified by Iogear’s Mobile Digital Scribe ($130, Iogear.com), uses a thumb-size infrared receiver clipped to the top of your page to capture the stylus’s movements. To upload a picture of the page, you simply unclip the receiver and plug it into your PC’s USB port; then you can add to it, e-mail it to a colleague as a JPEG file, or convert it into editable text. (See our full review of the Mobile Digital Scribe.)
Unfortunately, the Scribe’s handwriting recognition software, Vision Objects’ My Script Notes Lite, is nothing to write home about. For example, the classic phrase “oh I used to be disgusted now I try to be amused” came out as “on 1 used to be disgusted now I try to be amoral” (which may be accurate, relatively speaking, but it’s not what I wrote). The good news: You can view your handwriting and the converted text side by side, which makes correcting mistakes easier. You can also create a personal profile to teach the program that on Planet You a particular squiggle represents an H and not, say, an N–but this feature is available only if you upgrade to the full version of My Script Notes, priced at â¬20 (about $30) at press time.
LiveScribe’s Pulse Smart Pen (available for $149 to $199 at Livescribe.com) is another story. About the size of a fancy fountain pen, the Pulse uses an infrared sensor built into its tip and special paper imprinted with an invisible grid to orient the pen on the page. Besides capturing your notes, the pen uses directional microphones to record audio and sync the sounds to what you’re writing. Tap anywhere on your notes, and the device plays back that portion of the recording with remarkable fidelity. So you can write “remember this” on the page, and when you tap those words, you’ll hear the information you wanted to remember. (This works only with special paper available from LiveScribe; a four pack of 100-page spiral notebooks costs $20.)
When docked, the pen uploads your notes to your PC, where you can edit or share them with other Pulse users on LiveScribe’s Web site. No handwriting recognition software comes with the Pulse, but it will work with My Script Notes.
The Pulse can do some other wicked-cool things, too. Write a word in English, and it will recite the word in Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish, or Swedish while displaying the translation on the pen’s tiny LCD. Write a math problem (34,567 x 2,342 =), and the Pulse will display the answer (80,955,914). Draw a piano keyboard on the page, and the pen will play the correct note as you tap on each key. Demo samples of these apps ship with the Pulse; full-fledged versions will be available separately later this year.
Whether you need a Pulse pen depends on how much time you spend taking handwritten notes. But the technology is impressive, and the Pulse could be the first in a long line of digital capture devices we carry wherever we go.
That’s something even I could remember.
