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Anoto-based Pens From Logitech
flanksteak writes "Logitech has announced the IO Pen, a ball-point pen with a memory. You write stuff with the pen, then drop it in its USB cradle and your bad handwriting appears on your PC. The pen is to be released in November. How cool would this be with support for a wireless protocol?" We've run some previous stories about this - no telling how well it actually works until it's tested, though. And at $9.99/notebook, the paper is about three times as expensive as regular paper.
Is 3 times as expensive as something as cheap as paper really that much of a problem for a new technology like this? Compared to most, this isn't so bad.
Ok, so I first read the article and do the "Oooo cool". Then I think about it. We have had the pen and paper thing for the Palm, way overpriced. Then things like a Wacom tablet, very cool for drawing but don't try using it to write with. So now we get this. I personally don't see the full use of it. Yeah, I can take written notes in class and get them on my computer but why not just type them in in the first place. I can barly read my handwriting anyway and normally lose my pens. Bought a pack of 7 UniBall pens a month ago, down to about 2.
At the risk of sounding unsupportive of new technology, the description of this thing makes it sound a bit kludgy. It appears to basically be an optical-mouse element tracking a regular ballpoint pen.
Of course the ability to digitally record your penstrokes is super cool (and I wonder how much memory is in there? How long could I write before I had to dump it?), but requiring the digital paper to go along with it... well, that smacks of Gillette's approach to razorblades.
Initially, I thought it was going to be some kind of system for actually tracking the literal ball that does the writing. THAT would be neat; normal paper, normal ballpoint pen, and recorded to boot. Then again, I know some optical mice work even without the special patterned mousepad, so I wonder if there's a chance this would work on regular paper...
How does it handle erasing? Can you digitally white-out your mistakes before it is uploaded? It's a neat idea, but I don't see many people using it. The only thing worse than a paper trail is a digital trail.
Oh dear...
First, a poster of someone else's face (facial recognition evasion).
Second, the goey fingerprint duplicator,
now this walk-by signature hacker on a PDA?
What would be next?
Hijacking IRIS pattern (simply stareing at the bathroom mirror)?
Stolen DNA pattern?
There is no solid defense against unrevokable but stolen biometric parameters.
The subject says it all. Optical mice can track movement on almost ANY surface. Why should this pen be any diffrent? Needing special paper completely ruins this product.
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
Actually, no. At least, you can't beat signature recognition devices that way. They look at presure changes, speed, and strokes, none of which are captured by this device.
Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
It's more likely calculating movements the same way an optical mouse is. Just storing direction and distance data by calculating the difference in pattern at a high sampling rate, so it should be able to store quite a lot of it.
Wonder if you could scan the paper in and print your own...
It's possible that the off-white colour is actually florescent or something and the pen might use a UV light source to track the movements.
Seems like the old inkjet / razorblades selling technique. Give them the technology (cheap?) then sell supplies. I won't buy-in to that type of technology.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
I think the best thing about this is the possibility of getting emails from people written in their own hand! Yes typing is quick and easy but it is so monotonous and uniform. Why should an email from my gf look the same as a email from my boss?
Could someone who knows tell me if it is possible to create a version of this idea that works with regular paper by tracking the ballpoint instead of taking pictures of special digital paper? It almost seems like Logitech has purposefully tied this product to digital paper for the sole purpose of creating recurring income. This reminds me too much of the printer and ink model. There is no way on earth I'm buying such a pen if I have to buy special paper to go with it. Give me a digital pen that works with regular paper and costs less than $70, and I'll strongly consider purchasing. Add some kind of wireless functionality (bluetooth, or even IR) so I can transmit to my PC or PDA, still for less than $70, and there is no way on earth I'm not buying the product.
Just think, we don't have to print out every incoming fax, we can save notes and e-mails typed into the computer... then this thing comes out, and we get to *write* everything down again.
Yeah, sure, it'd be useful for people who usually take paper notes anyway (like me), but for the whole "making communication easier" thing, it seems like a waste of perfectly good paper to scribble out a quick e-mail to someone with this pen.
Super ninja monkeys will one day rule the world!
What I want to know is, does it timestamp everything you know? I mean, it can keep track of what page you're writing on, but how about when it was written? That would be real handy if it did that.
I can certainly imagine ways of doing that that DON'T require digital paper.
Just out of curiosity, how else would you do it? You need to compensate for the fact that people pick up the pen and move to a different spot on the paper while they're writing/drawing. How would you deal with that without special paper.
Who here thinks $9.99 is 'TRIPLE' the price of a regular notebook? Where I come from a notebook costs about .19, that's more than 50x the price.
Assuming the razor blades and ink-jet cartridge marketing plan:
They sell a 160 page book of letter-size paper for $9.99. That's 9.648m^2 per book. Assuming for a minute that the whole 60,000,000km^2 is made up of just these books, and the entire area of the book is usable, then one book is .000009648km^2.
So 60,000,000km^2/.000009648km^2 = 6,218,905,472,637 books, or at $10 apiece, $62,189,054,726,370.00 that 's 62 quadrillion dollars at retail. You could probably buy a whole planet for that price. Assume the wholesale cost is half that, you still get 31 quadrillion dollars.
Anyway, that's a buttload of potential profit for step #2 of the Underpants Gnomes' profitability lemma.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit