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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.
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
for £149, couldn't you just get a cheap PDA and just never take it out of notepad mode? plus if you ever felt the incentive to actually use it, you've got that opportunity. Get a pen-shaped stylus and you're set.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
I mean, who's going to use digital when a Bic and a Sticky....How does one transfer digital notes to your mother/spouse/friend?
:)
This will become about as widespread as MS BOB
-thewldisntenuff
My MythTV HowTo
Environmentally friendly? Creating batteries, pens, and producing resistors are not environmentally friendly...I'm not sure what they really mean. Can anybody explain?
Tell the truth and you won't have so much to remember.
According to the article: 50 pages, tiny, feels cheap, excessive batteries, can't even exit some of the menus. Overall rating = 4/10
I think I'll pass for now, especially with the £150 (~$270)
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
You can get smaller, lighter, and easier to use PDAs with a better screen for that kind of money. And they can also serve as handwriting capture devices if that's what you want. If someone had shown me this gadget and asked me to guess how much it cost, I'd have been off by a factor of 10, because it looks comparable to the Palm knock-offs Royal was selling for $50 four years ago... and I'm sure you can buy equivalents for $15-$20 today.
Yeesh. The problem here isn't that digital note taking as a problem, it's that Pegasus is charging ten times what it's worth (or, alternatively, doing ten times less than they should for the money they charge).
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
The paperless office will, like privatized Social Security, never happen.
Not that it can't work, it just won't happen. Many years ago Xerox was hearing this new "buzzword" paperless office so much they decided to do something. They took a bunch of guys and sent them down to Palo Alto and told them to come back with this paperless office.
Well, they went down there and developed a number of things, Ethernet and GUI's being among the new things, and brought it back to show their bosses.
Once the head guys saw it they said: "No one will use this!".
Of course they were partly wrong, but partly right. Of course we use GUI's and Ethernet, but still no paperless office. And that "Office of the Future" was developed in 1970. 34 years later and we have no paperless office.
Why? It isn't feasible. As more computers go into the office, it seems to me that more paperwork is needed... just to take care of those computers.
Electronics are "earth friendly" either, so that isn't a good reason to ditch paper and pen. Trees for pencils and paper are usually grown on farms or their replacements planted immediately -- not so easy to replace the heavy metals sometimes used in electronics.
Plus... dumping paper in China isn't likely to kill their citizens like computer equipment dumped there does. (But as long as China takes the check for dumping services, that is partly their fault)
Get your Unix fortune now!
For note taking (and book reading, by the way), we humans like something that falls within the realm of experiences that we evolved to deal with. Scratching with a pen on paper, which generates tactile stimuli and visual ones, seems to fit the bill nicely since we all are apt to do this (Post-It notes, anyone?). So, until we have e-paper that can be maltreated just like r-paper (real paper) with an e-pen that can be handled like an r-pen, all digital note taking technologies are going to fail. It should be clear by now that it is almost impossible to mould people into a particular technology. If you don't believe me, then why is you monitor full of post-it notes?
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
Whats the killer app here? no-one has found a reason yet that a PDA is more useful than some paper, most people who even have PDAs only use them for games really, everyone stores their numbers on their phones and notes on paper. Stick a very easy input system on a phone (as easy as a pen), make it easy and free to send anywhere and people might just do it. a way of writing that feels so good you would rather use it than pen and paper, the recognition doesnt need to be perfect, but instead of converting it right there it could be converted and kept with the original notes - when you want to search for something you search the converted text - some of which will be wrong but hopefully enough to get the keywords, then you read the original handwriting on your very hi-res screen and if you want you can convert it and correct it properly.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Hell, we don't even need that reason. He should be modded down just for his use of "paradigm shift"
Digital paper and pens will not be practical until you can write a note on your office desk and it can effortlessly and instantly appear on your home kitchen fridge.
These ideas of ubiquitous computing were postulated over 20 years ago (perhaps by Xerox?) and we are not much closer to making this a reality.
can't sleep. clowns will eat me.
Here: http://www.anoto.com/
l ?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=
Their concept will blow your mind. Basically the best integration between traditional paper and pens, computers and the Internet.
Wired (the magazine, not the website) ran an article about them a few years ago. You can read it here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.04/anoto.htm
Regards,
AIH
Nobox: Only simple products.
In the article he writes Pegasus thinks they've found a bridging technolgy or something to that effect. I've seen similar writtings in the market spins of other similar products. All I see is someone getting tired of clipping the little reader on their notepad/having to carry around another gizmo/screwing around with inevitably buggy winbloze only software, loosing the reader in the dark recesses of their desk drawer and then using the fancy reader/ink pen on conventional stickies, legal pads and Franklins. All I see this ultimately doing is driving away more would-be converts. I hate this family of devices and I've never even played with one. As for importing hand written or drawn works we've had plenty of ways to do that for some time now. That's the way to market these things. Take a look at Nokia's Bluetooth pen. I read about it some time ago and if memory serves me right that's the spin they used. And yes, I'm too lazy to link ;-)
My suggestions? Well, the writter already listed some and I'm preaching to the choir. Perhaps if I was writting this with some snazy digital pen... Instant on. NO BOOT TIME! most PDA's have this already fairly well. Perhaps putting something in there wherein the PDA "knows" you want to just start jotting things down. I.E. when the status comes near the screen the unit wakes up and an input panel opens. I'd say the UI should allow for immediate input, preferably via fast, accurate and trainable handwritting recognition, and have say a small toolbar at the bottom. One would first jot down whatever it was and then hit the tool to file it under, eg contact, freehand/drawing, etc. Let's take that one step further and start parsing that input once the app is started so that say if it was a contact the app could try and sort it out. Perl anyone? Who wants to donate one of those new Zauri to me so I can get started hacking this together? ;-)
Other things I would do would be to keep the instant-on app launching buttons Palm has. That's truly useful. Those should also launch straight into the app screen and not the jot screen I mentioned. More cellphone integration or better yet let's retry the cellphone module, a.k.a Visor springboard. SDIO GSM/CDMA phonecard with a BT headset anyone? I like that new S/E headset with the small cord and lapel clip display. How about just getting more simple cellphones out there with BT or WiFi and getting the nice PDA's with both below that $450 barrier? $299 seems better and just loose some of the fat. And would someone please get it into M$'s head that a PDA UI need NOT look and work like fscking Windows? Clicking down three to five layers to get to a hand writting app is just fucking stupid. Finally, if the physical pen tip to screen interface could be made better that would help. If someone would come up with the just right combination of screen surface and pen tip that would help. I'd also bet that focusing more on using landscape orientation for handwritting and perhaps some well thought out auto-scrolling as one writes on the virtual paper might be a nice touch. Once again, send me that Linuxed-up Zaurus you don't really need and I'll get right to work on it ;-)
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