TECH TO GO

Pen and paper get integrated into devices

By Andy Walker, Cyberwalker Media Syndicate

The world has a love affair with paper. It's light, thin and mobile. Paired with a pen, it's the fastest way to store information. It's the ultimate low-tech gadget.

Of course, there are new mobile electronic gadgets that will recognize your handwriting, so you can take jottings with you in your pocket. But, heck, paper does that for pennies, not hundreds of dollars.

So it's not surprising that technologists are reintroducing paper into computer products and re-engineering pens to generate the old-fashioned liquid ink and digital ink at the same time.

IBM, for example, has developed the ThinkPad TransNote. It's a 5.5 lb portfolio case that folds out to reveal a fully-fledged Pentium III notebook PC with a foldaway 10.4 inch LCD touch screen on one side and a standard pad of paper on the other.

When the included pen is used to write with ink on the pad, the jottings are also stored into flash memory hidden below the pad. It can store up to 50 digital pages at a time and - at frequent intervals - it transmits the jottings to the PC.

The pen has a little radio transmitter in it, which is enabled when the nib makes contact with a sheet of paper. It transmits the location of the pen to the device to capture anything you write digitally. You tell the device with a poke of a sensor when you've turned the page.

IBM sells pads that have page numbers on them to match a digital counter, but any 8.5 x 11 inch or similarly-sized pad works as well. Words can also be circled on the written page to designate searchable keywords for the PC. This is the only place where the system uses handwriting recognition. Everything else is stored as an image.

On the PC, pages can be converted to popular image formats and e-mailed or shared with others via a network. IBM opted not to build in handwriting recognition because the technology is still imperfect. "Recognition technology provides 80- to 85-per-cent accuracy," said Tom Grimes, IBM Worldwide Mobile Marketing Manager. "So you would have to go back to the computer to make edits and changes and we decided to not put the user in that situation."

Grimes said IBM is targeting students, sales people, architects and other frequent notetakers with the device.

"It's the start of a more natural way to interact with the computer," explained Grimes, adding that voice recognition and other new methods of interacting with computers will be coming from IBM in future devices.

The TransNote will be available Feb. 20 for $3000 US to $3350 US ($4,000 to $4,500 Canadian), depending on the configuration of the computer.

IBM is not the first to take the paper-meets-silicon approach. Seiko Instruments offers the SmartPad. It's a wallet that holds a Palm handheld computer and a 5 x 8-inch memopad. A special pen is used to capture pen on paper notes similarly to the way that the IBM TransNote works.

The images of the notes are saved on the Palm device via its infrared port. They can be then transported for use on a computer in BMP or GIF format. Like the TransNote PC, the $200 US ($300 Canadian) SmartPad comes with a special pen that doubles as a stylus.
Perhaps one of the more revolutionary spins on good old ink and paper is being developed by Anoto. It's a Swedish start-up financed by Ericsson and C Technologies.

The year-old company is developing a pen that can write with ink on paper. At the same time, the pen digitizes an image of the handwritten page and transmits it via Bluetooth technology to another device for storage or transmission.

Bluetooth, of course, is a new short-range wireless networking technology about to come on the scene. It will be used to share data and Internet connections between devices that would normally be connected via wires.

The pen could connect to a nearby computer or notebook, which could file the captured digital page for safekeeping. It could also send the digital ink as an e-mail attachment or as a fax.

Where the device differs from the SmartPad and the TransNote is that it has to be used on paper that has a special pattern printed on it. The pen's eye reads this grid to give it a frame of reference. That could give traditional paper daytimers a new lease on life. The grid could even be printed in a newspaper ad, changing the nature of responses to advertising, contests or even the crossword puzzle.

Linux Wiebe, Anoto's director of new concepts, believes it's a waste to throw paper and ink away when it works so well.

"Humanity spent a couple of thousand years developing pen and paper and we've reached something that is extremely powerful," he said. "It's light, has high contrast and there's virtually no cost. Plus, there's market penetration of 100 per cent, so there is no reason to throw that away."

Anoto has signed agreements with a variety of paper product companies in Europe, North America and Asia to create the specialty paper products. They include Mead Corp. and Franklin Covey. Even 3M has signed up to create Anoto-friendly Post-It Notes.

The Anoto paper would also feature printed boxes. If you were composing an e-mail on the pad, you would print the recipient's e-mail address into a form area and it would be use to address the e-mail you had just handwritten. Boxes could be checked off to specify how the information on the page would be handled. One box would designate it an e-mail, another a fax. It could be even sent as a text message via a cellular phone's short message service. In fact, when the pen is first made available this fall, it will be bundled with an Ericsson cellular phone. The first standalone pen will be priced above $100 US ($145 Canadian) , but Wiebe expects to get the cost below that when the second generation of the device hits the market.

So if the pen is mightier than the sword, then how much mightier will a silicon-enabled pen be? With replacement pens costing between $50 US and $100US ($70 and $140 Canadian), pen theft could suddenly become more than just a crime of absentmindedness. Doodlers could be exposed. Diarists could be monitored. Record keepers could be hacked.
Whatever happens, we can expect some interesting social change.

Back to Tech to Go columns