Digital smart pens are ballpoint pens with integrated electronics that can read penstrokes using special notebooks. The result is that anything you physically write on the paper also gets stored in the pen and can be transferred to a computer. Think of it as something in between an actual pen and a digitizer pen. DOTnote, one such pen from a Korean company, even goes as far as having Android support that updates your notes in real time.
The pen connects to you Android device via Bluetooth and you can then store and view your paper notes on the device as well. It requires a special app, and you have to write on the special paper notebooks, so this still isn’t a replacement for digitizer pens that provide better accuracy on tablets than touchscreen styli do. If you like writing on actual paper and just want to have a digital copy as a backup, however, this is probably even better.
The downside is the battery life, which is rated at 2 hours. That doesn’t really get you through a lot of things that require note taking, such as lectures or meetings. I also can’t seem to find anywhere to purchase it, or even any price information. Even the company’s own web pages seem to be missing a store or any information on where to buy, and their user upload pages are full of Korean text. This suggests to me that the product isn’t commercially available anywhere else (yet). Still, nice to see more companies thinking about mobile device compatibility.
[DOTnote]
