The Globe and Mail

It was inevitable: The hottest trend in computing appears to be a pen.

Well, call it a smart pen. Or, more accurately, a fat pen. One stuffed with enough digital components to almost classify it as a computer.

Three companies have recently released smart pens with the kind of aplomb that suggests the pen is all we really had in mind when we went digital. If we could, we'd shrink the smart pen down to the size of a Bic.

There's something in that — put aside all the hype, and there's still no gadget that's as satisfying as a pen.

The three latest digital pens come from Solutions Into Motion (PaperIQ for Blackberry), IOgear (the Digital Scribe) and LeapFrog (Fly Fusion). Each approaches writing slightly differently, especially the business of making sense of what my fifth-grade teacher called "chicken tracks." None, however, begins to match the elegance of the recent designs in fountain pens.

The PaperIQ digital pen is an extension of the Blackberry, a thumb-saving device, if you will, and its body shaft is thick, so it might appear a little awkward in a boardroom. It's a Bluetooth affair, and must be "paired" with the Blackberry, like the wireless Bluetooth headsets, using supplied codes. It comes with a special notebook (an Oxford Easybook M3), three extra ink refills and a USB charger stand.

The user is required to initialize a new notebook by using the pen to tap a certain box printed on the front of the notebook, and each page of the notebook by giving the document a title, a subject line, and the letters BT in a column on the right or B in a special "action" box at the bottom of the page.

To transmit the page contents — drawings, doodles and cursive text — one pokes a box at the end of the notebook. The pen then transmits the contents to the Blackberry, which will accept the notes as text files, using optical character recognition to translate the writing into readable text. The pen will then vibrate three times to signal the end of the process.

This is a pretty complicated procedure, but not impossible to remember. Learning it is a little easier than coming to terms with the fact that the PaperIQ requires special ink refills and special paper — the PaperIQ will not work with plain paper. Not only will supplies be pricey, they will have to come from a limited number of stores or over the Internet.

There's another little feature to the PaperIQ pen that's interesting. It's possible to upload the notes to a special account on the Internet, to be available wherever you are. To perform that feat requires software for the PC that comes as a whopping 81.1 MB zipped file. The special account, including the Intelligent Character Recognition licence and notes hosting, costs $139.95 a year, or $259.95 for two years. It's very much a corporate product.

IOgear's Digital Scribe, on the other hand, is the only pen under discussion here that works with any kind of paper — it's billed as the first to do so — and uses standard ink refills. It talks to a little infrared dongle that clips to the top of the page, which in turn connects to a desktop or laptop computer using a USB cable. The drawback of course is that you can forget being able to ditch the high-tech equipment. And also forget about ease — unlike the PaperIQ, which demands you tap your pen on specific places, you have to reattach the IOgear dongle to the top of every new page.