Wanted: a system for casual digital note-taking

Tara wonders if there any good small electronic notepads that you can use with an electronic pen for jotting down notes during the day
The Livescribe Echo
The Livescribe Echo: uses special paper, but at least it's still paper

Are there any good small electronic notepads that one can use with an electronic pen rather than with a keyboard? I need to jot down notes during the day, and at the moment carry a small paper notepad the size of a cigarette packet. But in this day and age, I can't believe there's not an electronic equivalent that enables you to take notes, file them and print them if necessary.
Tara B
You could have bought something like that in a previous century, but times have changed and you may want to consider different options. The first and most obvious is to use a smartphone either with a built-in keyboard (such as a RIM BlackBerry or an Android phone) or a "soft" on-screen keyboard (such as an Apple iPhone or an Android phone). Try both types to see which you like best, and if possible, have a look at Swype text input software as well. The second and rather less obvious option is to use a "digital pen" system such as Livescribe Echo. This uses special paper, but at least it's still paper.

I always try to answer the question as asked, rather than saying "you don't want to do that". However, dozens of companies have been trying to produce what you've asked for since Jerry Kaplan founded GO in 1987, and none of them managed to replace paper. The most successful attempt was the the Palm range of PDAs (personal digital assistants), which were small enough to carry everywhere and provided electronic note-taking using Graffiti software. You had to write your notes one letter at a time in a box on the screen, but people who practised a lot could become very proficient at it.

After that, numerous manufacturers including Compaq (iPaq), HP (Jornada), and Dell (Axim) produced rival PDAs that used Microsoft's PocketPC software, and later versions had excellent handwriting recognition capabilities. I'm sure these systems still have fans, but I gave up on them fairly quickly. I found I had to write slowly and carefully to have my bad handwriting recognised, I had to wait for the recognition software to do its work, and almost inevitably I had to make corrections. It was quicker and easier to make notes on paper then type them up later.

Microsoft solved these problems with its Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and OneNote 2003, which was adopted by some journalists I know. These tablets required an active digitising screen that worked with a stylus, much like a Wacom graphics tablet, and the software now recognised "ink objects". In other words, you could write in digital "ink" as fast as you liked, and decide if you wanted some or all of it converted into text later. The reason for using the OneNote application rather than the operating systems input panel was that you could make an audio recording that synchronised with your handwriting. If you plugged in an external microphone, the recordings were pretty good.

Problem solved? No. These Tablet PCs were not the size of a cigarette packet but often the size and arm-bending weight of a laptop computer. Companies and a very few individuals still buy things like HP EliteBooks which work as both notebook and tablet PCs, and are built to MIL-STD 810G US military standards. However, the lightest is 3.3 pounds and has a 12.1 inch screen. Both Vista and Windows 7 now have much better ink and touch capabilities than XP, but even a netbook-style convertible is too big for most people to carry around.

As we now know, pen-based Windows computers (going back to Windows for Pen Computing for Windows 3.1 in 1991) failed to attract consumers. Indeed, the market has actually gone in the opposite direction: away from using a fine stylus to using fat fingers on capacitive screens. These are now standard on smartphones and tablets like the Apple iPad, and they're good at what they do, but they're not designed for handwriting recognition. You can buy a special stylus such as the DAGi or Pogo if you need to draw diagrams, but I think you'd usually be better off entering text using the on-screen keyboard.

In the end, then, I suspect the best alternative to a smartphone is to use a digital pen that doesn't need you to carry around a machine with a screen. However, it does need a special kind of paper, invented by a Swedish technology company called Anoto. This is available in notebooks of various sizes, which adds to the running costs. You also have to buy special ink cartridges for the pens.

Anoto sells its own digital pens, but there are alternatives that use the same system. These include the Logitech io2, the Fly pentop computer, and two Livescribe SmartPens, the original Pulse and the new Echo. The only one I've used myself is the first Anoto, almost 10 years ago, so you'll have to find the one that suits you best.

An Anoto-style pen has a tiny infra-red camera in the tip, so it knows where you're making marks on the special paper. You can transfer the image to a PC, and then use third-party optical character recognition (OCR) software such as Vision Objects' MyScript to convert it to text. The specific version would be MyScript for Livescribe, which you must download first for a 30-day free trial.

The Livescribe pens also record audio while you're writing, and you can pick a point in your paper notes and listen again to whatever the person was saying. This is what makes Livescribe pens popular with students, lawyers, journalists and so on. If you're on your own, you can make voice notes or tell a story. You can save, upload and share sessions, which are known as pencasts.

A pen like this comes closest to retaining the casual aspects of writing notes on bits of paper, but you do have to remember to turn the pen on.