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."

Comments

Why not a PDA?

[lecithin]

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.

Another solution...

[erick99]

...in search of a problem. I don't know what will replace pen & paper but it will be a huge paradigm shift and not just an electroninc similie of writing.

Cheers,

Erick

149 lb?

[-kertrats-]

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.

What's the sense in digital pen/paper-

[thewldisntenuff]

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

Environmentally friendly?

[tajmorton]

Environmentally friendly? Creating batteries, pens, and producing resistors are not environmentally friendly...I'm not sure what they really mean. Can anybody explain?

Lovely

[comwiz56]

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)

poster forgot to RTFA

[Jason1729]

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

It's a caponised PDA!

[argent]

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).

um, digital pen and paper? been done before..

[admiralfrijole]

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...

Paperless office...

[ImaLamer]

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)

Re:Paperless office...

[Saeger]

Trees for pencils and paper are usually grown on farms or their replacements planted immediately

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).

--

Re:Paperless office...

[rtaylor]

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).

I would love to see them. I know that the local recycling program for paper saves about $60 per ton over standard disposal techniques despite having higher expenses. The reason is that recyclers are buying up the paper for more than the difference in costs (landfill vs. recycling program -- sorting for recycling is not cheap).

I suppose my question would be why are they buying used paper for the purpose of recycling it, when they could simply get regular ol' trees?

Somewhere along the line there is must be a significant energy or manpower expense.

I would place my bets that the studies you did not refer to don't include the full trail -- like shipping of the materials hundreds of kilometers.

Doomed to fail

[InternationalCow]

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?

flying cars?

[t_allardyce]

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.

old idea needs new innovation

[mmmmmhotpants]

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.