Magic Pen

Cross has the CrossPad? - anyone tried it? http://www.cross.com/cross/pcg.html It's priced o.k. - but the thought about lugging one more piece of ejunk is a little tiring. -- MikeWhite

I tried. Bogus most of the time. It can recognize letters in Portuguese, it can be slightly better in English. I used for interviews and decided it is good just for drawings. I know other 2 people that bought also one and think like me.

What it misses:

• It is heavy
• Difficult to put a notebook on it
• Bad character recognition (as everything else)
• Need specific software

Currently, scan your drawing would be better.

There are, however, some 'magic pens' being proposed:

• Anoto: http://www.anoto.com/ (requires special paper)
• http://www.otmtech.com/vpen.asp (not yet there)

The pad mentioned above brings to mind Seiko's InkLink? product. I haven't tried it, but it looks promising as a way of capturing scribbles. You get the benefit of freehand drawing, notes, etc. with the additional benefit of electronic annotation, transmission, storage and retrieval. Anyone here have experience with that? -- GarryHamilton

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GeneralKeys? Mobile-Pro

I recently bought one of these for EUR 70 and are trying it out. Pearl.de really is the German edition of ThinkGeek with lots of more or less useful (my wife would say useless) stuff. But there I found this small gem for which EUR 70 is really cheap (at least compared to the above big iron "solutions".

It requires a small (7x3x1cm) box clipped to your sheet of paper which tracks the pen. I clipped it to a cardboard sheet which I put between my HipsterPro? (TM) sheet stack.

You write normally on any piece of paper. The pen is light and normally sized (not like the monster pens above) and uses a standard lead. The pen requires a small battery but I think it doesn't have much logic of its own - it is probably only a miniature position transmitter. The receiver box has a button to switch to the next page and downloads all the sketches when it is plugged into USB and displays all your sketches, Very neat.

It comes with character recognition which works fairly well though it should be possible to replace the bundled standard software that is somehow plugged into the downloading and vieweing tool. At least the sketches can be exported.

It can also be used as a mouse replacement though it can't compete with real mice and the like.

Sadly it seems to require a proprietary Windows software at least for the transport of the sketches.

• http://www.pearl.de/a-PX1101-1000.shtml (German site, but the video below should explain it anyway)
• http://microsites.pearl.de/video.php?video=PX1101_14_73909&p=PX1101&v=902&j=i5H34ZK2ZQ7_H_G8x8

-- GunnarZarncke