Although I have terrible handwriting I often prefer the free-format nature of taking notes with pen and paper. The problem in today’s electronic age is that they are hard to share, index, archive and search unless you go through an obsessive process of scanning everything – time consuming and pretty painful.
I have tried using tablet PCs and UMPCs with software such as OneNote, InkSeine and Evernote but never found anything that felt natural and didn’t require a compromised way of working.
My latest attempt to solve the problem is the Pulse Smartpen from Livescribe.
The smartpen is deceptively simple. It is about the same size and weight as a good fountain pen (in fact it feels very similar in the hand to my Mont Blanc) but it contains an embedded computer, an OLED screen, memory (1GB and 2GB options), microphone, speaker and a camera.
All that technology allows it to monitor what you are hearing, track what you are writing or drawing and, by using the camera to recognize codes embedded in the paper, perform functions and execute small applications (eg calculator or currency conversion)
At the end of a “session” you simply connect the pen to it’s USB docking/charging station and everything you wrote and the audio you recorded along with it gets synchronized back to the desktop application where you can then chose to upload and share.
It’s not perfect yet, though this is the first release of the device so hopefully they’ll address some of these as time goes on.
The physical form factor is great, but it uses special ink cartridges and the method of swapping them (and to insert a stylus) is a bit clumsy. Ideally it would have an option to swap from ink to stylus and back again easily – as you need to “double tap” on your work to replay audio or perform certain functions you can end up with weird marks on the page.
The reliance on the paper embedded with the Dot Positioning System means you can’t just grab any notebook and write. Though they do supply both notepad and journal sizes (lined and unlined) so it’s not that big a restriction.
No OCR support. Although you can search documents within their desktop application it doesn’t support full OCR or export to OneNote or Word. They do say that 3rd party tools are coming to extend the platform (they have a developer program if you want to explore) but to my mind this is a pretty important piece of functionality I was surprised to find missing.
It’s not 100% reliable. Unless there’s a good light source and you write carefully enough it does sometimes miss letters or parts of them. It also doesn’t cope very well with shading – once you’ve drawn over the Dot on the paper it’s not very good in picking up when you shade over the area. There’s also no pressure sensitivity which also limits the usefulness for sketching (though block diagrams etc are easy)
It’ll be interesting to see if I can get by without my laptop – just using the Pulse Smartpen to take notes in meetings this week… could it be the beginning of the electronic office ;)