Reporters spend a lot of time scribbling into notebooks and then typing those notes into a computer program. Now they and medical professionals, students and other serious scribblers can skip a step with a new electronic pen from IOGEAR that digitally converts notes, memos and drawings.
The pen looks, well, like a pen rather than a high-tech piece of electronics, and it is equipped with that lifeblood of pens known as ink. Simply jot down your thoughts (as many as 50 pages, or up to 8MB) on any piece of paper and the pen will send a signal that feeds your handwriting to a pocket-sized reader.
Wireless Convenience
Back at your desk, plug in the reader to a PC with a USB cable and your notes are exported as a JPEG file that can be shared with classmates or editors via e-mail. A CD included with the unit comes with optical character recognition software that works in a dozen languages.
The Mobile Digital Scribe is a cordless version of IOGEAR’s Digital Scribe. Keith Renty, strategic business and product development manager, said the Mobile version does everything the previous version did, and then some. “It has greater flexibility because you don’t have to be tethered to a computer,” he told us. The Mobile version also added two more languages to its OCR software (which includes English, many Western European languages, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Russian).
In the competition against other digital pens, Renty said the Digital Scribes are more flexible. “The advantage we have is both units use standard paper, and both use what appears to be a normal-looking pen,” he said. Renty said the Mobile can also take advantage of Vista’s Tablet PC features; it will work as a mouse or selection device as well as a pen.
In response to a reporter’s question, Renty…