Logitech io2 Pen & Livescribe

02Dec08

About 5 years ago I purchased a Logitech io2 digital pen. It’s a pen with a built in camera.

You write on special stationary that has patterns on each page so the pen knows where it as it writes (probably the main downfall of the product actually) The technology was developed by Anoto and then licensed to various Companies that manufacture the pens and the paper.

The usefulness of the pen for me has been able to have an electronic copy of all the notes I have written. The pen comes with software to convert your hand written notes to electronic text but I never got it to work accurately. I re-did the ‘training’ a few times but my hand writing is just to awful. Even for the human eye to distinguish what I have written requires reading the whole sentence before a particular word becomes distinguishable. But for my needs, which is an electronic copy of my notes, the gadget works perfectly.

So, what can you use it for? Apart from having an electronic backup of what you write instead of loose papers or books, I used to create an image of my notes such as minutes of meeting that could then be emailed onto people. It’s also nice to be able to save your hand written notes with your electronic documentation for a project for example. My Doctor uses the pen to write info relating to a patient which he then files with the patients other electronic records.

Probably the most useful aspect of the tool is if your company does surveys or has people complete questionnaires. The survey questions can be printed on the Anoto paper and if a person writes every letter in a block can be converted to electronic text. This can save companies significant amounts of coding resources that are probably slightly more inaccurate than using the digital pen and possibly a lot slower in getting the information into an electronic format.

Sadly the io2 pen has been discontinued (but still available new from many online stores). However, another company, LiveScribe that makes use of the Anoto technology has gone one better, they have added a voice recorder to the pen so while you are writing or drawing diagrams, the person/s voices talking to you are recorded. So, lets say you have taken notes at a conference or lecture, you simply click on the diagram or text where you want to find out what was said at that time and the pen plays back only from that part of the lecture.

The io2 pen has been a fantastic tool and we look forward to trying out the PulsePen.

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