By Andrew Liszewski
I usually don’t like to write about ‘promised’ technologies, but I’m hopeful something will come of this one. If you read my review of the FLY Fusion Pentop Computer you’ll know I came to the conclusion that it was more suited to kids and pre-teens, rather than adults. But it seems Jim Marggraff, the inventor of paper-based computing and the original FLY Pentop has left that company to start Livescribe, which promises to adapt the same technology for more serious uses.
Like with the FLY Fusion pen, the Livescribe will rely on special ‘Dot Paper’ but the company is hoping to provide it as cheap as any other paper on the market. What’s even better is that their dot paper can actually be printed using a certified home or office printer. The Livescribe pen also promises to be just slightly larger than a Montblanc, and will incorporate an OLED display for additional feedback. More importantly it will hopefully be able to interpret cursive writing as opposed to just printing like with the FLY Fusion.
The Livescribe is scheduled to be available in select education and consumer markets come the first quarter of 2008. – Thanks to commenter Meghan for the tip.
*Update: It’s come to my attention that the FLY Fusion pen is actually able to record and convert cursive writing into editable text. While the pen’s interactive menus and applications still seem to require you to print, from my own testing it is more than capable of recording notes made in cursive writing. (Though the accuracy is slightly less than what I achieved when printing.)
As a result I’ve updated my FLY Fusion review with additional notes reflecting this.
[ Livescribe ]
