The Logitech io Personal Digital Pen, in detail

In my comments on the last post, Lynn said... "Your sister's sending you digital men? WOW! What a great sister. *g*"

Mwahaha. Yes, she is a great sister. And she'd be taking it to a whole new level with the sending of men. But no. That was what the pen interpreted my writing as. Good stuff.

Ok, here's how the pen works. When you open the box the first time you have to do the typical driver installation and set up. The lights are supposed to immediately come on at the bottom of the pen, showing you the battery status and letting you know it's working.

This was the only problem I had. I had no lighting going on, and the pen did not show up in my device manager. I ended up installing it on 3 different pc's, then spending half an hour on hold with customer service, before they told me that the batteries were probably so dead (from sitting on the shelf a while) that there was not enough juice to light up the pen. And that I should leave it plugged in for a full day, and call back if the pen never "woke up".

Mmm. Ok. Why couldn't you put that in the manual, I was thinking. I thanked the very nice customer service rep and pushed the pen to the back of the desk where I wouldn't obsess over it for the rest of the day.

(A quick moment of praise for Ted from customer service. He was SO helpful, he ended the call by telling me what times to call in the future to get the quickest response / shortest hold times. If you ever need to call Logitech io customer support, the best time to do so is around 10:15 am or 12:15 pm est - that's when they've got fresh people manning full phone banks.)

Since I started messing with the pen at 9am and it was now 10:30, I decided to forget about the pen for a while and get some work done. About 11:30 my pc beeped and a new icon popped up in my systray. The pen was awake! Lights were glowing and things were happening.

The icon lets you know the charge status, so I kept an eye on it until it hit 100 percent. Then it was time to play. First you have to do a sample page of your handwriting, to teach the software how to interpret your squiggles. Transfer what you just did back to the pc by putting the pen back in the cradle. Now the pc knows you're writing style, and you are ready to start writing.

One downside to the pen is the paper. While the pen will work as a regular ink pen on any paper, you have to use their notebook paper to utilize the digital part. A tiny camera (according to this FAQ) "registers the pen's movement across the grid surface on the paper and stores it as a series of map coordinates".

So, how well does it work?

Pretty well actually. I was impressed that the software recognized about 75 percent of my cursive writing. Sometimes I don't even recognize 75 percent of my cursive writing.

Recognition is higher if you print instead of writing in cursive. Printing in all caps, the software has been 98 percent accurate. I haven't used it a lot - I filled two pages of the notebook - but you can retrain the system if you notice particular letters getting missed a lot.

For people that draw, this would be a great pen to digitaly transfer pen sketches to your pc.

Amazingly, that looks exactly like what I drew. I'm going to try to find someone with more some artistic talent and get their opinion on the pen.

Ok, so two thumbs up on this from a toy perspective. It does just what it says it does - takes what you write, and moves it to your pc. And it recognizes really bad handwriting very well.

One thumb down for cost. The books have 60 sheets, so 120 pages to fill, for $10.

Sis gets two thumbs up and a case of virtual Pinot. Thanks Deborah! You're the best :)