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The trouble with capturing what you write down on a piece of paper and recording it in any meaningful way is that it’s hard for a pen to ‘know’ where its nib is when a pen stroke is made and, in fact, when a pen stroke is being made at all. Even if you do figure out a way to tell the difference between writing and when a pen is being jabbed rudely in the direction of an obstinate colleague, there are numerous other hurdles to overcome.

You could record a series of words if the writing was continually joined up, but in practice this wouldn’t work. You wouldn’t be able to cross your ‘t’s and dot your ‘i’s for a start without making a complete mess of the page. And that’s before you get to the problem of figuring out which page in your pad you’re writing on.

Logitech’s approach with its io2 Digital Writing System is to use a special kind of paper. Called ‘Digital Paper’ this has a very faint pattern of dots printed on every page, which act as a kind of map, allowing the pen to scan them and find out where it is.

The digital pen itself has a camera built into the end of it, next to the nib, which records the dots. This means it’s quite a chunky thing and its cigar-shaped profile won’t be to everyone’s taste either but it is nicely made and it feels reassuringly expensive. Inside it can be found more fancy electronics – 856KB of flash memory for storing up to 40 pages at a time and a rechargeable lithium ion battery (non-user replaceable) that’ll give you around three hours of battery life on continuous use (280 with the cap on and the pen turned off).

Also supplied is Vision Objects’ MyScript Notes handwriting recognition software, which attempts to convert your jottings into neat typed pages – it also attempts to convert your diagrams and tables too. You have to ‘train’ the software to get the best results and despite my scepticism I was surprised at how well it dealt with my scrawling script. It is, however, far from perfect. Most irritating is that training is a one-shot deal – it won’t let you refine its training later on when you realise it’s getting your ‘r’s and ‘v’s mixed up all of the time.

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