Thursday, January 10, 2019

Moleskine digital pen

I do not always have to run through the airport to get in time for the flight, so I had the time to visit a Moleskine store.
The first thing that caught my eye was the Moleskine digital pen and notebook.
Moleskine digital set
The set costs 229 EUR and you get the pen and a notebook. The digital pen works only together with this notebooks so you can't write on anything and get the thing digitalized (or at least this was the claim of the seller). It has a replaceable cartridge, that can be easily swapped when it runs out of ink. It connects through Bluetooth to send the digital version of your writing to the app. The pen has a tip that tries to mimic a fountain pen. Its shape makes it pretty comfortable in hand. Beneath the writing tip, there is a small infrared camera that is responsible for digitizing your writing.
The pen I tested in the shop required a little pressure to record in a digital version what you write. If you just make a fine line on the paper there is a chance that it will not be recorded integrally. Another negative is, like with every digital part of your life, it requires juice.
As cool as this thing is I do not think this is the future of the pen. Somehow for me, it seems a bit outdated. A few years ago this was the coolest new thing, taking notes and having them digitalized instantly.
But now I think there are better options. As a student, you could use a tablet to take all the notes, which is small and compact. Or you could still use the classic pen and paper and then scan the notes or even better, use the phone to "scan" the documents and digitalize everything.
Phones are getting so much better, and cameras on them are more than enough for this type of thing. For a long time now I stopped scanning documents. I just take a picture of it. And there are a ton of apps, free and paid to straighten the paper, crop the excess, OCR the writing and so on.
Plus you can scan this way any kind of paper.
pokemon, harry potter, moleskine, notebook
Pokemon and Harry Potter Moleskine notebooks
Of course, this is what I think, and I could be totally wrong about it. I would be really curious to see the impressions of people who own and use digital pens.

2 comments:

  1. I like that moleskine is attempting this, but as you said, it's going to be almost impossible for them to beat out a good pen, a good paper, and a photo with any modern smartphone. You could use a document scanner for this price, but there is no need unless you have multiple notebooks or need archival quality.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you for your comment, I am in the same mind set.
    There is no perfect way to do it, each has it's weakness and strengths. The camera on the phone was enough for me to scan without any hustle, a book i needed to digitize. The app did the heavy lifting, cropping and turning the picture to dual tone.

    ReplyDelete

Popular Posts