1
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.
Paper IQ for BlackBerry
Solutions Into Motion
$299.99
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.
Digital Scribe
IOgear
$89.99
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.
Unfortunately, the dongle needs to be pretty well seated to work properly, so the clips must be strong; and it's not easy to attach it to the page, which could result in a bit of a distraction during a meeting or a class.
That said, however, the Digital Scribe uses something that looks like a real pen, with a narrow barrel that looks at home in a shirt pocket. But the pen is made of an unappealing black plastic; it also has a very odd tool in the top of the cap designed to help remove exhausted ball-point refills, which works less efficiently than a pair of pliers.
The pen is powered by two watch batteries that sit in the other end of the barrel under a screw cap, just where you would place the pen cap when using it. But the design is such that on occasion the battery cap will come unscrewed or simply pop off when parking the pen cap on it, allowing the two batteries to spring out, which can make things embarrassing. Considering the advances made recently in pen design, I can easily imagine features that would make IOgear's better.
One of the best features of this digital pen is its remarkably accurate handwriting-recognition software, called MyScript Notes, which supports 10 languages and converts handwritten notes, shapes, tables and drawings into digital information (more on this for all three pens later). Somehow, the clip-on dongle and the contents of the pen seem to be more accurate than the systems that rely on special paper.
Another great feature is the ability to use the pen as a mouse. There's a little button on the barrel of the pen, which acts like the one on a mouse. Considering how imprecise mice can be, this feature can, in some cases, be a godsend.
The Digital Scribe is also designed to integrate with Microsoft Office and especially Microsoft OneNote as used on tablet PCs. The pen will work especially well with OneNote 2007, which supports customizable pens, scratch-out gestures and an improved eraser.
Fly Fusion
LeapFrog
$99.99
The LeapFrong Fly Fusion is a slimmer evolution of 2005's Fly Pentop, but still fatter than the PaperIQ pen. Like the others, it is designed to upload written notes to a PC (Sadly, not to a Mac) and convert them to text. It has been given more memory and has a built-in MP3 player for those who simply cannot solve quadratic equations without help from Avril Lavigne.
Like the PaperIQ, the Fly Fusion requires specialized paper and uses a tiny camera mounted along the shaft of the refill to read handwriting and drawings, guided by the unseen tiny dots embedded in the paper. Now I haven't done much research into how people regard their writing paper, but I suspect some might be put off by the included wire-bound notebook, which looks exactly like those notebooks you thought you had left behind when you graduated from high school, with a wide margin down the left with three ring-binder holes. These cost about $8 to $10, and must be bought either at a specialty store or online.
To operate, the Fly Fusion needs to tap a box to initialize a new notebook, as you do with the PaperIQ, tap another to start recording and still another to stop. Then connect the pen to your computer via the included USB cable, and upload your creativity.
But at least the Fly Fusion has a lot of accessories. The unit comes with a French-English translator, thesaurus and dictionary a "music studio" that allows users to create, mix, sample and record their own tracks and help with solving algebraic equations. Extra accessories include notebooks with content (such as math for kids and older students), a Spanish translation system, help with spelling, synonyms or brainstorming, a memory expansion cartridge, extra ink refills, brain teasers and diaries. The makers include a $10 gift certificate toward purchases of these extras — clearly, LeapFrog intends to dominate the market by appealing to students aged 10 to 16 years, swamping its competitors while doing so.
By stuffing the pen with so many games and features, LeapFrog clearly intends to get younger users attached to it. Games include versions of Pirates of the Caribbean and Harry Potter, with more promised by LeapFrog, to be priced about $12 each. Whether the strategy will work remains to be seen, but it looks promising enough.
The Fly Fusion can also be used as a stylus simply by retracting the refill, as with a normal ballpoint pen, and use it with the games or tutorials ion the number of books that come with the pen, or are available separately.
The only real drawback to the Fly Fusion is that the pen is fat, and makes me want to grab it in my fist, like a child. This puts a cramp on the ease with which one can write, but the included optical character-reading software is actually pretty good in translating scribbles.
I took the grand old phrase The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog (and a couple of others), and ran it through all three pens, just for laughs. I didn't try to be either very accurate or sloppy.
Here are the results:
IOGear's Digital Scribe
First try: the Therfield brown Ag jeeps rwtklazzdawgr
Second try, more carefully: Thigpen brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
PaperIQ
First try: treae brown fop I biceps goatee lazy og
Second try: Regicide brown fox icecaps over the lazy dog
Fly Fusion
First try: The Quick Brown foe jumps ovwtlelazg dog
Second try: squid brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Well, that's what happens when your penmanship was honed scribbling notes during street riots, hurried phone interviews and in complete darkness.
