Took me two years to get around to buying one, but i finally got one of the Logitech Digital Io pens, revision number 2 of course lol. This brilliant little piece of kit, which isnt all that much larger than most modern fountain pens, records every single thing written on the logitech pads.

Granted the concept of using a proprietry pad isnt greatly appealing, but 3 pads only sets a bank account back around £8 and each pad holds 128 pages of A4 printed paper !

The pen requires the use of the special logitech paper due to its method of working, each page of the pads is not just a plain piece of paper, but has millions of tiny dots printed on it which appears to the human eye as just off-white paper. The pen itself contains a small camera, located underneath the ballpoint nib which interprets the pens writing location based on these dots (unique to each line and page in the pad).

Once you have finished writing your notes for the day, its as simple as placing the pen into the Dock station and waiting for the transfer to complete (matter of seconds, depending on how much text is stored). The pen can hold upto 40 pages of solid text in memory and has a battery life of 25 pages of use). The battery life is somewhat a pest, strange that it wasnt designed to do 40 pages of text and 40 pages of battery, i can well imagine this becoming a slight problem for some people in a busy work environment.

The pen software also uses a technology called IoTags, which allow the user to use special symbols on the page as they write to catagorise their writing, for example, writing an ‘E’ with a circle around it, followed by the subject and the content underneath will instruct the software to automatically convert this wrting to text and place it into a new email ready for your review and sending ! This technology is also customisable, I for example am a heavy user of Microsoft OneNote, which is an extremely powerful program which no educational student should be without. With a small customisation to the Io software, tags can be used to instruct the immediate transference of notes directing into OneNote !

Text Conversion is also something which has come along leaps since the last time i played with it (prob 1997 lol) but with a little training, around 3 pages of A5 writing, the conversion is virtually seem less (and iv got appalling handwriting). Ready for review and exporting to your important documents/reports.

Id strongly recommended this is to anyone in need of real world to digital notes conversion, im amazed more people in firms such as lawyers and secretary’s don’t use these, especially now the price of the entire kit is sub £100 and even cheaper if ya shop around.

Iv attached a zip file with some high res pictures of the pen and dock station, but also check out the logitech site for more details on the specifications and Io Software !

Images

Example of Page Dots Pattern Here