Product Reviews

How many times have you written down someone's phone number and discovered you just can't find it? Did you write it on a Post-it note, the back of an envelope or the margin of a newspaper?

If this sounds familiar, Logitech has a solution. The io Digital Pen is a battery-powered ballpoint with an optical sensor and handwriting 'memory'. It works like a normal pen, writing with ink on paper. Pop it back into the docking cradle, though, and everything you've written is downloaded to your PC.

For this to work, you need to buy Logitech's own brand of paper, specifically designed for the io Pen. This paper is overlaid with a special dot pattern to help the pen track movements.

The io Pen comes with two items

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of stationery: an A4-sized Oxford ring-bound EasyBook and a smaller Post-it pad. Both have checkboxes you use to indicate that you're starting a new document, or that the current one is 'Done'.

The A4 pad also has boxes in which to enter the note's subject or title. These boxes have a separate square for each letter. As long as you write a block capital in each square, the pen uses character recognition software to decipher your handwriting and give your document a subject header or title.

The rest of the page is given over to your handwritten jottings. The software makes no attempt to recognise these - they're simply attached to your e-mails and so on as pictures.

The package does include a demo version of MyScript, a handwriting recognition program that converts image files to editable text. This isn't an instant, fluid, faultless process, though - and you're likely to have to modify your handwriting technique to get it to work at all. That's a lot of hassle to do something that handheld computers have been doing for ages!

The other catch is the price of the paper: at five quid for eighty pages of A4, you won't be using the Digital Pen for idle jotting and random doodling.

If the io Pen came with easy, reliable text recognition software it could be really useful.