Pat sent me this. But since it is a year + a day since he updated his blog, I'll post it here for him (slacker).
I'm not much of a 'gadget' guy (yeah, yeah, ignore the phone). I am much more into general purpose stuff - a computer, a camera, a phone, etc. But as computing gets more and more embedded and ubiquitous, things that once were 'gadgets' now are cool-ass fully-functional parts of the computational collective that is devouring us all.
I like this.
I dislike - as any sane person would - the need for custom paper... but at a $150 price point it's kinda irrelevant. By the time we solve the paper problem (which is tricky, yeah) the price will be down to 1/64 what it is now.
By 2020 (or hell, even 2019) we'll be buying 8-packs of these the same way we buy Bics now (err - wait a minute... I can't remember the last time I bought a pen... where do they frikkin' come from??), and they'll be fully wireless and dumping their data to a PC in real time whether you're drawing with them on paper, on a white board or in the air.
So. Cool.
That's pretty slick. I agree that it would be perfect without the paper though. Maybe you could put an accelerometer in it and just have a mode that sets your writing area whenever you define the lower left and upper right corners in 3D space. It might still require a base of some sort that could help the pen triangulate its location, but then it would be like the old school quill and ink.
Of course, I'm no inventor, but it seems like it would be a solvable problem in the foreseeable future. Of course it's the Future we're talking about here so who knows. Pens? Where we're going we won't need pens.
Posted by: Seth Burnette | March 06, 2009 at 09:52 AM
I remember Logitech dabbling in digital pens a while back (which also required special "smart" paper).
On the one hand, I can see the usefulness of being able to quickly distribute meeting notes and audio to a number of people. And, as a gadget, it's neat.
My issue with smart pens isn't their (currently) prohibitive cost, it's their frailty. I've bricked more hard-drives than I've had house fires, so the probability of loss or failure is significantly higher than a traditional pen/paper/filing cabinet set-up.
Posted by: C.J. Kershner | March 06, 2009 at 03:41 PM
CJ
yeah - but IMO the value here is being able to turn one analog thing into infinite digital copies of the thing. Sure if you are just saving your stuff in a big folder, then you'll lose it to HDD failure sooner or later... but if you're using it in the context of a team or other creative group where data is being sent around and shared and emailed and checked into source control, then it's safe.
For personal use... fuck pens - use a PENCIL.
Posted by: Clint | March 07, 2009 at 12:25 PM