Logitech io Personal Digital Pen. DAY TWO. A review in parts.
Today, I took several pages of notes, during meetings, with the Logitech Pen. Here are my thoughts.
OCR
Yesterday, I was not satisfied with the handwriting recognition(trial included). I was using the included Post-Its and I thought the included notebook might be better. The handwriting recognition software is not noticably better with the notebook. But, I learned a few tricks. Doing a “select all” when in the handwriting recognition application lets you grab all the text and you can format it yourself in Outlook or Word if you plan to share it with someone else. Also, the best way I’ve seen to improve the handwriting recognition is to add words that it missed to your dictionary.
The OCR software does not recognize bullets, so you need to use dashes if you want the formatting to carry over to converted text.
I haven’t tried to train the OCR with the included training sheets, but I think my printed writing is too unpredictable to accurately train it. Maybe another day.
STABILITY
I’m much more comfortable with the interface now and I realize that yesterday’s description, “Clunky”, may have been too harsh. Also, I think it’s great that all my notes will soon be stored safely on my PC. A rogue cup of coffee or an over-zealous desk cleaning will no longer mean lost data.
CONVENIENCE
I think I won’t be using the OCR software much, but it’s nice knowing that if I had to get the notes from a meeting and distribute them quickly, I could convert the text, make a few corrections, load it up in Outlook and format it properly. I did just that for one set of meeting notes today and it was much quicker than typing the whole thing in from hand-written sheets.
All pages are searchable, even if you haven’t run them through the OCR software. So, I’ve gotten into the habit of putting a very clear title and some keywords at the top of each page. Typing in a search phrase will give you a list of documents that contain those words. Also, the documents can be organized, in the io application, into a hierarchy. That hierarchy is matched with files and folders on disk, in the My Documents/My io Documents folder.
COMFORT
At meetings, I feel comfortable taking notes with the pen. As I mentioned yesterday, typing lots of notes(or using Graffiti) during meetings feels impersonal to me and very constricting. With the io, I’ve been able to take notes the same way I’ve been doing it for years.
NEXT
Tomorrow, I’ll address processes. For instance, what’s involved in getting notes from the pen to my Tungsten C? I’ll try jpgs, unformatted text, formatted text, etc.
John Tokash 