The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard Mandan ND

Posted by : Matt Lake

Call me old-fashioned, but I like to write using a pen. Not a stylus, you understand--a real pen leaving a trail of real ink on real paper. Give me the choice between picking up a glorified toothpick to scrawl on a plastic-coated screen smaller than my palm and having a substantial writing tool in one hand and a pad of paper in the other, and there's no contest. It's ink and dead trees all the way.

But there's a fundamental problem with this approach. Once you've made paper notes, then what? More and more, the computer's the epicenter of both office and personal organization. Everything you jot down while you're out and about has to be typed in if it's going to be "real"--a to-do item in Outlook, an e-mail, or the sketch of a killer new idea you need to share with the team. A pile of paper notes on the desk is, organizationally speaking, little more than a fire hazard.

So are we doomed to do our work twice, first in handwriting, and then on a keyboard? Not necessarily. Not with an Anoto digital pen, anyway.

This brainchild of the Swedish company Anoto became a bona fide computing platform this year. Logitech's Anoto-based Io Pen records every pen stroke, stores up to 40 pages of it in onboard memory, then transfers it to your computer through a USB cradle. And such companies as 3M, Mead, Esselte, and FranklinCovey all have introduced supporting products to integrate paper notes into computer personal-organization software.

It's not ...

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