Logitech io Personal Digital Pen. DAY THREE. A review in parts.
As you may know, I’ve been posting notes regarding my experiences with the Logitech io Digital Pen for the past few days. Here’s more!
GENERAL OBSERVATIONS
I wish I could open my Outlook calendar, pick an appointment and see all notes taken with the pen during that time, regardless of what page in the book they were written on. The pen doesn’t timestamp each stroke and I think it should.
You can save Digital Pen documents as images. I copied a couple JPGs to my SD card, but RescoViewer treats them like small 320×320 images and zooming just shows low-res blowups. There is probably a “better for large images” JPG viewing application out there and that would help. I think the ideal solution would be a synch process that copies all the Logitech io .pen files to the memory card in the same hierachy they appear in you’re My io Documents folder. Then, there should be an application on the pda that can interpret the XML .pen files to display the pen strokes. Zooming and panning would be a lot cleaner that way. Maybe there’s a way to convert the .pen files to a format used by a “vector graphics” palm editor. “Vector graphics” are images made of shapes and strokes rather than pixels(like bitmaps).
When I write a word in all capital letters, the handwriting recognition tries to recognize each letter without the context of the surrounding letters that make up the word. The only way to make it treat the all caps word correctly is to enter the word in the dictionary in all caps. This was frustrating for me, at first, because I normally write in all caps.
There is no workable system for users who want to dock their pen at work and at home. I haven’t tried it, but I see how the files would get completely out of sync, with some pages ending up at home and some at work. This is a problem that could be resolved by desktop software. And I hope it does.
The Logitech io Digital Pen has a TERRIBLE cap. It fits on the back of the pen, but falls off if you turn the pen upside down or wave it around. Incidentally, if you lose the pen cap, the pen will never know when to turn off and it’s batteries will wear down.
NEXT
Hopefully, I’ll find a good solution for viewing pages on my PDA and document that tomorrow. I’d also like to discuss, briefly, productivity applications that I think this technology could spawn. The following day, I’d like to wrap up, with a pleasant summary and compare the Logitech io Pen to the feature lists of similar products that are on the market now or soon will be.
John Tokash 