Mightier Than the Keyboard
Digital Pens That Talk to PCs
Are Coming of Age
If you're anything like me, you've probably got a drawer full of gadgets that you used once or twice and then quietly forgot about. Mine contains a pocket scanner for scanning receipts (never around when I need it); a device that is supposed to skin and slice papayas in one smooth motion (only no one in our house seems to like papayas); and something called a Logitech digital pen. Forget Early Adopters; people like me are the Surly Adopters: We buy stuff and don't give it a chance.
But one of these gadgets is fighting back. The digital pen allows you to write normally on paper, but also to save what you write to your computer, simply by placing the pen in a cradle connected to your PC. This is done by using a special pen and paper. The pen, as well as writing with ordinary ink, takes snapshots with a miniature camera of what you write, and the paper, covered in a unique patchwork of tiny dots, acts as a map for the pen to locate where on the page you're writing. Upload the pen's memory to the computer and you can see exactly what you've written or drawn on pages, recreated on your screen.
Logitech Inc.'s io pen first came out three years ago, but it's never really taken off. One obvious problem was that the first pens were a bit too, well, chunky for most users. It was a bit like holding a Cuban cigar in your hand. Fun for a while, but your fingers tire of the novelty pretty quickly. Logitech fixed that with a smaller model a year or so ago, although it's still bigger than your average pen. Perhaps the real problem when pitching it to the ordinary user was that it was just too unwieldy. Not as unwieldy as other attempts at digital writing, which involved special clipboards, or attaching little infrared devices to your pad of paper, or carrying around wallets containing your PDA and a specially mounted notepad. But still unwieldy. As Tim Aughenbaugh, president of a South Dakota-based company called Talario LLC, which makes products for digital pens, puts it: "Many people quit using a digital note-taking solution after a month or so, and the pen goes in a drawer."
To its credit, Logitech is still pushing its vision. Well, it isn't really Logitech's vision, but that of Swedish company Anoto AB, which invented the concept of a pen with a little camera and paper with a unique dot-map approach. Logitech licenses the technology from Anoto, and has been the most aggressive in pushing the idea. Or rather ideas: to retail customers, it's the idea of easily being able to save notes, drawings and other doodlings; and to businesses, it's the idea of replacing heavy computer-like devices with specially designed paper and pens that can store and upload data to a computer, even wirelessly, using, say, Bluetooth. This market, says Olivier D'Eternod, Logitech's European business manager for digital writing, is close to critical mass. In the past year or so, he says, he's helped more than 100 companies -- some of them heavy hitters -- to develop systems. "This is to me the best signal that something is going to happen," he says.
Indeed, from monitoring onsite construction workers in Scotland to handing out parking tickets in Italy (both of which are actually happening), the Logitech pen makes sense for organizations, which might save money on expensive hardware, breakages and training.
But for the ordinary user who would love to use a pen to do more stuff away from the computer, how exactly does this help? Well, Logitech is hoping to address that with a new version of its pen, the io2, just launched, which the company hopes will tempt a few more people to try it. The main changes are in the software, which improves on earlier efforts to recognize scribblings and turn them into editable text on the screen.
The new version allows you to add your own words and names to a personalized dictionary, improving the recognition rate. Another nice twist is improved tagging, which allows you to insert codes into your writing so that, when your pen uploads what you've written to a computer, the text is inserted automatically into certain programs -- Microsoft Word, say, or Outlook. The company also has cut the price of its pen set to $200 from $250.
This takes the digital pen one step closer to being something that fits the pocket and work-style of you and me. But perhaps what's most encouraging is the emergence of third-party products that give you a few more options.
Take, for example, Talario, the company founded and run by Mr. Aughenbaugh. The company's Xpaper features the same dot-map style, but is loose-leaf, rather than being in a book, and has no markings other than the dots (the io paper, for example, includes formatting such as headers), so users can design their own forms or print out existing forms and documents. The sheets can then be written on with most Anoto-ready pens.
Doesn't sound all that exciting? Well, imagine you receive a document that requires you to fill in boxes, tick others, and sign it before returning it to the sender. Normally, you'd either try to fill out most of the form on your computer, but in any case you'd have to print it out at some stage, sign it, and then either scan it and email it back, or fax it. With Xpaper, you could simply print it out, fill in whatever needs to be filled in, upload the pen's contents to your computer -- and you have a digital version of the document, complete with all your handwritten entries. Not just that: The pen's ink shows up as blue while the form itself is black, meaning you have a perfect copy.
Logitech isn't the only company selling Anoto-style pens. Nokia Corp. has had its SU-1B, costing about $250, for a few years, and Hitachi Maxell Ltd. has recently launched the sleek-looking Penit, priced between $250 and $300. But Logitech has shown more enthusiasm -- and flexibility -- than the others in trying to figure out how something like this might best work. It deserves a try -- or, if you're a Surly Adopter like me, with a pen in a drawer, at least a second chance.
数字生活
数字笔应用日渐成熟
那么很可能你也已经有了一抽屉的、只用过一两次的新奇电子玩艺。在我的抽屉里，有一个每次要用时总不在手边的便携式收据扫描仪，一个用于木瓜去皮和切块的设备（但我们家似乎没人喜欢木瓜），以及一个所谓的罗技(Logitech)数字笔等。也许有人会说我是喜欢尝试新事物的人，但对像我这样的人或许用“乖戾的使用者”一词更恰当：我们买了东西，却不给它们一个一展身手的机会。
但有一件电子玩艺正重新引起我的注意，它就是数字笔。数字笔可以像普通的笔一样在纸上书写，书写完毕将笔放在与电脑相联的一个座架上就能将书写内容传输至电脑保存。这一切需要特制的笔和纸。除了能用普通墨水书写，数字笔带有一个微型照相机，可拍下你书写的内容。而这种特制的纸上带有独特的微点阵，就像地图一样帮助数字笔定位你在纸张上所写的内容。将数字笔存储的内容传输至电脑后，你就能在电脑屏幕上看到你刚刚在纸上所写所画的内容了。
罗技的io数字笔三年前就上市了，但从未大红大紫过。一个明显的缺陷是第一批数字笔对大多数人来说用起来都太笨拙了，就好像手里握了一只古巴雪茄。也许一开始你会感觉很有趣，但新奇劲儿一过去，手指很快就感到不舒服了。大约一年前，罗技推出了一款较小的数字笔，虽然仍要比一般的笔大。但在向大众消费者推销该产品时遇到的最大问题可能还是数字笔用起来虽然比其他数字书写科技产品方便一些，比如特殊的写字夹板、与纸张连接的小巧的红外设备、装在口袋里可随身携带的个人数字助理以及特别安装的记事本，但终究还是不便。正如总部位于南达科他州的数字笔产品制造公司Talario LLC的总裁Tim Aughenbaugh所言：“许多人在一个月后就放弃了数字笔记解决方案，数字笔被扔到了抽屉里。”
值得赞扬的是罗技仍在锲而不舍地推动实现其愿景。哦，对了，从严格意义上来说，这应该是瑞典公司Anoto AB的愿景，正是这家公司用一个微型摄像机和具有独特点针的纸张创造了数字笔的概念。罗技采用的技术缘自Anoto的授权，并是最积极推进这项技术的公司。或许我们更可以说，罗技是在向大众消费者推广简单存储文字、图案等书写内容的观念，向企业客户推广无需笨重设备、即可向电脑存储和传输（甚至无线传输）数据的观念。罗技数字书写欧洲业务经理蒂埃特诺德(Olivier D'Eternod)表示，这个市场很快就将发生巨大变化。他说，过去一年左右，他已帮助100多家公司发展这个系统，有些公司还是非常有影响力的大公司。他说，对我而言，这充分表明数字书写系统应用前景可观。
的确，从目前的一些应用实例来看，不论是在苏格兰用于建筑工地现场监督工人、还是在意大利签发违规停车罚单，罗技数字笔给企业带来了实实在在的好处，节省了昂贵的硬件采购、损坏费用以及培训支出。
但对于大众消费者来说，如果想在不用电脑的情况下拿数字笔做更多的事，这款笔能给我们提供怎样的帮助呢？罗技希望刚刚推出的新款数字笔io2能解决这个问题，并吸引更多的人试用。新款数字笔主要的变化在于软件，在识别手写体并转换成屏幕上可编辑的文本方面有了改进。
使用新款数字笔时，你可以将自己的惯用词组以及名字加入个人化词库，提高识别率。另一个亮点是改进了后缀功能，你可以在书写时加入某些后缀符号，以便数字笔将书写内容传输时电脑中时，文本会自动启用某种软件，如微软(Microsoft)的Word或Outlook。新款数字笔组合的售价也从250美元降到了200美元。
这让数字笔更容易放入口袋，也更符合你我的使用习惯。但最让人鼓舞的或许是第三方产品的出现，这扩大了你的选择余地。
比如，Aughenbaugh创立和经营的Talario。该公司的Xpaper是点阵式散页，没有被装订成册，页面上除了点，也没有其他标记（而io纸张还有抬头等格式）。因此，用户可以自己设计格式或打印现存的格式和文件。大多数采用Anoto技术的数字笔都可以使用这些纸张。
或许听起来还不那么让你心动？好吧，不妨设想你收到了一份文件，要求你在表格栏里填好、打好勾并签名后回复给发件人。一般情况下，你都会在电脑上填写好大多数内容，然后打印出来签名，再扫描、发送电子邮件给发件人，或签好名后发一个传真。但有了Xpaper，你只要打印出来，用数字笔填好所有内容，然后将数字笔中存储的内容传输至电脑，就有了这份文件的电子版本，手工填写的内容一应俱全。而且更让你惊喜的是：数字笔的墨水会显示为蓝色，而表格本身是黑色的，完成后的文件几乎完美无瑕。
罗技并非是唯一一家出售Anoto式数字笔的公司。诺基亚(Nokia Corp.)几年前就推出了售价250美元左右的SU-1B。Hitachi Maxell Ltd.最近也上市了外型简洁的Penit，定价在250至300美元。但罗技比其他厂家似乎更积极、也更灵活地尝试如何才能更好地适应消费者的需求。它值得一试，如果你和我一样抽屉里早已有了一只这样的笔，不妨再拿出来试试。
