From Handwritten Notes to PDA
Sometimes a less-than-wonderful pairing improves when one of the partners is changed. Caviar doesn’t work at a toddler’s birthday party, but it’s fine at a Bel Air soiree.
Seiko Instruments’ $169 SmartPad, which lets users take notes on a 5-by-8-inch paper tablet and transfer them to a hand-held device, is now available for the Pocket PC platform, specifically Compaq Computer Corp.’s iPaq and Hewlett-Packard Corp.’s Jornada. A magnetized pen and transceiver send an image of what’s inked to the hand-held via infrared.
Pairing the SmartPad with a Palm OS device was a mediocre experience. The big frustration: The Palm could not translate handwriting from the SmartPad into electronic characters that could be searched or annotated.
Change platforms and the dynamic improves. Microsoft Corp.’s Pocket PC 2002 operating system blows Palm out of the water with its Transcriber software for handwriting on screen. Although not perfect, the software enables the hand-held device to recognize sentence after hand-written sentence fairly accurately. Therefore, the lack of built-in handwriting software for the SmartPad add-on is less noticeable.
What is noticeable is the way the SmartPad’s ink notes and a Pocket PC can work together.
The software install process was flawless and quick. Once installed, communications between the pad and the hand-held were perfect.
On both the Pocket PC and the desktop computer, Seiko’s software for handling the notes is very good. Users can set a keyword for a given note and index it. Notes can be sent as e-mail items. When the Pocket PC synchronizes with the desktop, the files are transferred into their own sub-folder for easy access.
The SmartPad-Pocket PC combination is a boon for people who want to jot down a chart or map or schematic, store it on the hand-held and then put the drawing on a desktop computer or e-mail it.
*
Mark A. Kellner is a freelance technology writer and hosts “Mark Kellner on Computers” at www .adrenalineradio.com from 5 to 6 p.m. Thursdays. He can be reached at mark@kellner2000.com.
