Slashdot Mirror
Batteries For Your Pen And Paper?
An anonymous reader writes "We've been hearing about the paperless office for years now, but we never seem to get any nearer to that environmentally friendly nirvana. It's just too easy to jot things down on a piece of paper, far easier than using a PDA. So maybe a digital pen and paper is the answer? The people at Pegasus, inventor of the Mobile NoteTaker certainly think so. Unfortunately, the
guy who reviewed the NoteTaker thinks otherwise."
This sums it up for me:
"Now, as a cheap gadget this would all be perfectly acceptable. But when put within the context of its price it borders on crazy. I am all for convergence technologies, but when you consider the Mobile NoteTaker is priced at just under £150 I cannot see many takers. This is more expensive than some colour PDAs we have had in the labs and 50 per cent more than the very useable palmOne Zire 31 which can be found for less than £100. "
I figure that if a person cannot use a PDA they are not going to be able to really use this. If you are one of those people, carry a pack of yellow-stickies.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
The reviewer didn't say a digital pen and paper is a bad idea. All the negative comments in the article are aimed at this implementation.
The build quality is cheap, it's big and bulky, it requires MS Office, etc.
The reviewer seemed to like what the technology had to offer, this implementation was just junky.
Jason
ProfQuotes
The Logitech IO pen uses a small camera and special paper with faint dots printed on it to record what you have written, then transfer them over bluetooth to your computer, phone, $DEVICE.
its slick in principle, but clunky, large, and uses expensive paper...
e to the pi i plus one equals zero
As regards the paperless office, Brown and Duguid's book "The Social Life of Information" is very informative in this regard. It points out that there are many features of paper that have yet to be duplicated, let alone surpassed, by current paper replacements. Until we get all of the advantages of paper with none of the current disadvantages, the paperless office is still a distant dream.
Indeed. And the dirty little secret is that paper recycling is actually WORSE for the environment than harvesting newgrowth, but nobody wants to believe that in the face of the facts (which I haven't linked to here). In fact, about the only thing worth recycling, in terms of saving both energy and environment, is aluminum. Once oil gets too expensive to extract, plastic can join that list too.
So, if you want to *be* "earth friendly", instead of *feeling* earth-friendly, throw away everything except your cans (at least until we can recycle 100% of everything with molecular reassembly).
--
Power to the Peaceful
We have been using the Anoto paper with a few of the digital pens (each with varying ease of use), and have created some useful systems in the process. Most notably:
- François Guimbretière's home page, which has links to all of the Paper Augmented Digital Documents (PADD) papers.
- ProofRite - A combination of a distributed PADD infrstructure and an extension to AbiWord. It allows for annotations to be incorporated into AbiWord documents, so that Tablet PC users may mark up their document on the screen. Further, users may print an AbiWord document, annotate it on Anoto paper, and have their strokes incorporated into the document.
I have also made a prototype with which users may compose music on Anoto paper and have it automatically converted to a Finale file (a popular piece of composition software), or annotate a printed Finale file and incorporate them back into the file.The gap between paper and computers has existed for too long. With this research and the amazing new hardware, I personally believe we'll be seeing the gap close quickly.
-Dave
Penn & Teller - Bullshit
Season 2, Episode 5 (#18 on the above linked page) - Recycling
Available on your p2p network of choice.
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!