The difference between hand scanning all my notes and using the pen is a simple one: convenience. After a meeting (or at the end of the day), all I need to do is plug in the device and the notes are transferred into the note management app on my computer; no futzing about with scanner software, etc. I just make a note of what the meeting was about and I have a much easier time finding my notes than I would thumbing through a notebook.

I’ve written more about my experiences with the IOGear Digital Scribe on my blog: http://simplisticton.livejournal.com/ — check it out!

Ben

The Dane Elec style pen and others of their type with USB receivers suffer from the problem of paper movement. If you bump or drop your pad or the cat starts chewing it on your desk, then your alignments are out. But with the Anoto dot paper you can come and go as you please and never be concerned about alignment because the pen is always aware of exactly where it is on the page when it starts writing.

Much better solution for business use as well.

I agree that most buyers will expect that this pen will provide them with good text from scrawled notes fairly painlessly. As a guy who has spent a lot of time cleaning up scanned OCR text, and using the old Palm Grafitti, I feel your pain.

So… would a more standardized, Palm Grafitti-like handwriting help? I noticed that in the heyday of the Palm, my handwriting got very Grafitti-like and almost readable.

http://www.livescribe.com/smartpen/index.html

I haven’t tried the handwriting OCR as I have no illusions as to its (in-)ability to read my henscratch, but having a digital copy of my paper notes has proven useful. I upload the notes after every meeting and they are automatically date and time stamped. I add a small note about the subject of the meeting. It makes finding old notes a lot more efficient than flipping through a notepad. The resolution of the handwriting is excellent (it stores the content as a vector image so “resolution” is not an issue), so I can always re-read what I’ve written.

I think if you go in expecting the handwriting OCR to work decently, you’re bound to be disappointed as even printed OCR is fairly hit-and-miss. But if you just want a quick way to digitize handwritten notes, it works pretty well.