A Pen that's mightier than – your PC?

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in its electronic brain, and forms the words you've written down. Now, all that's left to do, is connect the pen to your PC, through a cable. And transfer all the data. You can read all about it at livescribe.com.

But all that isn't cheap. The pen costs close to Rs. 12,000. The ball point can be replaced. But you'll have to buy it from the dealer, when the ink runs out. You get a thick notepad full of dot covered pages with the pen. But when that runs out, a replacement notebook costs about Rs. 250.

If you can afford the pen (I can't -I'm hoping an Indian, or Chinese copy hits the market soon!) - it sure is a great idea. My first thought was about my wife. She's a school teacher and writes out sample question papers and annual report cards, all by hand. Her school is planning to go digital very soon, but she can't type very fast, just yet.

A pen like this could let her do all her work, just as before. At the end, she'd just attach it to the computer and get all her data instantly digitized into text. Think of what her students could do. They could write their class notes, their homework, everything. Back at home, plug it into the PC, and get a permanent record of the assignment that they could email to say - someone who couldn't come to class that day.

Did I tell you - converting your writing into text isn't all that his pen does. If you're writing something really important, you can click on a little icon on the bottom of the page and bookmark that little snippet of text. So when you are revising your notes on the PC, you can instantly go back to that bookmark you made.

Now, of you're a journalist, or someone who attends a lot of meetings, then THIS might be useful. This pen records audio what's more, it syncs the audio, to the notes you're taking at the time.

So no matter how long I wrote with it, I couldn't manage to write as neatly, or as "beautifully", as I'd have liked to.

Number 2: on connecting the pen to the PC the first time, it took quite a long time to sync all the data. Thankfully I didn't fiddle with anything and it worked fine after that initial long pause.

Number 3: Initially, the software converts your notes into a PDF document or into a JPEG image. To convert into text, you have to download another piece of software from a site called visionobjects.com. The site says I get a 30 days free trial, after which, I'll have to pay. Not sure if that payment is taken care of by LiveScribe when I buy the pen.

Number 4: The handwriting recognition is pretty accurate - I'd say it easily understood 85% of my unreadable, squiggly handwriting. But the 15% errors it created cost me about thirty minutes of my time - correcting mistakes and reformatting text before I posted it online.

And oh, the text got saved in the NotePad editor, from where I'd copy and then paste in a Word File. A bit more of fiddling might take care of that I guess.

Number 5: For some strange reason, the Pen wouldn't register text that I'd written on the bottom five or seven lines of the notebook. I'm not sure why. It might be a software bug. Or maybe I'm doing something wrong. But that meant I'd manually type out those last few lines on every page. Slightly off-putting. Other than that, it's been quite nice.

Before I sign off - a word about Mr. Jasmani, from 4GeniusMinds, who got the pen for me. For reasons beyond my control, testing the Pen and writing this blog got delayed for an obscene length of time. But he's always been very patient and helpful. I sure hope that behavior's going to extend to all of you guys, who might choose to buy and use the Pen.