I recently read some reviews regarding electronic pen devices, and in a fit of fiscal flippance, went out and bought zPen. (I insist on referring to zPen as zPen, because it's made by a French company. The irony is awesome. I wonder if zName was given to zPen knowingly....)
zPen is pretty cool. There's a USB clip that clips on to any old standard paper tablet. You turn it on and then use zPen like a normal pen, writing on the actual physical paper. When you need to turn the page, you unclip the clip, flip the page, and then re-clip. This tells the clip you've gone to a new page, which is a great feature.
It comes with viewing software that just prints or saves to pdf. It also comes with handwriting recognition software that is an admirable attempt, but handwriting recognition is always a neat idea in theory, never in practice.
I've fiddled with both pieces of software and the viewing software is probably all I will use. However, it will allow me to store my hand-written notes on my PC as pdf's. That's freaking cool, and that's why I bought it. I NEVER refer to hand written notes. This, I might use. The handwriting recognition works surprisingly well, if I write neatly enough. I'll explore that and maybe report back if I change my mind on handwriting recognition.
Plus, the thing doubles as a 1GB USB drive, so what the heck.... It's just replacing the pen and drive I was carrying around in my pocket anyway...
Comments (2)
In case you're wondering, this was a raw text capture... The ALL CAPS portion is really my block lettering where I do big caps and small caps instead of lowercase, but it did that acceptably. The last line was in cursive, and the stuff it messed up on was probably my iffy cursive handwriting anyway. Overall, not bad.
This is a test of the 2-pen
IT SEEMS TO BE FASHING
WHEN I WRITE,
SO THAT IS WORKING
- THE PEN IS A GOOD PEN
- I WONDER HOW IT WILL READ MY HUNT WRITING
- Itch, maybe Sell ty cursive, if I can remember how to unite it.
Posted by Jason | July 11, 2008 2:16 PM
Posted on July 11, 2008 14:16
I've been using this now for a few weeks and I've started to develop a routine with it. I take it to meetings, write better notes than I used to, and I store .pdfs by date and topic in my My Documents now. I don't have time to use the recognition software, but I managed to save three pages of handwritten notes that got caught in a rainstorm yesterday because I had them stored electronically.
Posted by Jason | July 31, 2008 9:16 AM
Posted on July 31, 2008 09:16