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.

Comments

erasing

[sploreg]

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.

Re:The ultimate forger's tool.

[Rantastic]

Viola, you've captured their signature and can forge it whenever needed

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.

Re:How it works

[Nogami_Saeko]

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.