Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

In an interview with Wired, the founder of Swedish mobile technology company Anoto started to convey his company's vision by holding up a piece of paper.

This is the most advanced digital input screen ever developed. It has very high resolution, perfect contrast, and costs a fraction of a cent to produce. Any graphical interface can be printed on it, and you get years of full-time education, paid for by the government, to learn how to use it. It will not be beaten in our lifetime.

That article caught my interest in 2001 (can it really have been that long ago?) Since then Anoto's vision of a digital note-capturing device built into a pen that writes with ordinary ink on more or less ordinary paper has been licensed hither and yon, going through a number of hardware incarnations: the Ericsson ChatPen, the LeapFrog Fly Pentop Computer, the Logitech io2 Digital Writing System, and the Nokia Digital Pen are the ones I know of. I came close once to buying the Logitech pen, which wasn't as chubby and clumsy looking as some of its predecessors. But just when I was about to jump I bought a Tablet PC instead, hoping I'd be able to use it for digitizing my note-taking habit and possibly as a new development platform to target. The tablet made a perfectly serviceable laptop, but after trying the pen input under real-world writing conditions I quickly gave up on using it for digital ink. It forced me to bear down uncomfortably, made my already messy scribbling look even worse, sent infuriating stray marks zipping across the screen and generally never let me focus on my thoughts instead of the technology I was using.

I was hoping that Palm's new device would be my digital ink salvation (it was not). But on the same day that the Palm Foleo was announced, the former CEO of LeapFrog announced the latest offspring of the Anoto technology: a product called the Livescribe Smartpen. And from a distance it looks more promising than its intriguing predecessors.

Check out the "sneak peak" of how a student could use the Smartpen and see if a light goes on for you. You can also see part of a live demo from the All Things Digital conference where the product was introduced. This response from a journalist who had the chance to see the Smartpen in action gives more detail about its planned future, including WiFi connectivity.

What I like about Livescribe:

• The synchronization of ink and voice capture is inspired. To be able to tap a word you wrote on a page and have the pen play back the audio from the moment that word was written—absolutely awesome!
• 100 hrs of storage in an enclosure that's finally not freakishly larger than a normal pen
• The price is right, but just barely: sub-$200
• Livescribe seems to be serious when they call this a "new mobile platform": they are planning to release all kinds of developer tools for creating applications

Some things that I'm not so keen on but I think I could now live with:

• The Smartpen requires paper that has been printed with a fine grid of dots to keep itself oriented to everything on the page. Fortunately, their web site states that you can now print up your own "on certified home or business printers," so they're not trying to make paper into a profit center. But it does mean you'll be carrying a pad of paper around everywhere (which I do anyway).
• The pen is still a bit chubby
• No way around it: the recorded audio is going to pick up the sound of the pen tip moving on the paper
• Would I lose it like I lose all my other pens? Probably. On the other hand, I never lose my car keys because I'm intensely conscious of their value (after all, they've got 4GB of precious data hanging off them!)
• The character recognition probably isn't great, but for what I have in mind (recording all my notes as ink) any words or phrases the software can make out would be good enough to make a decent searchable index of my notes

The pen has a one-line digital display on it that reminds me of a Palm OS concept device I once worked up for my own amusement. The idea there was another kind of "mobile companion" product where you could click a button on the side of the pen then jot down an appointment, contact, task or note that you wanted to sync to your smartphone via an integrated Bluetooth radio. The Livescribe pen doesn't seem to have any hardware buttons, but perhaps it can be trained to recognize handwritten symbols that would signal it to interpret the text that followed as a particular data type. Could be fun and useful!