So now that you what this pen is capable of, it's time to start putting it to use and seeing if it really is all that.  We pulled the tip off the scanner and did a few dry runs on the paper.  Because of the rubber wheels, rolling the scanner over a sheet of paper felt very natural and did not slip at all. 

We turned it on, created a new note and noticed that the tip was flashing red.  This meant that it was ready to scan.  We placed it down on the sheet of paper and the red light illuminated the paper and stopped flashing which meant it was ready to scan.  We moved the pen across the text and waited for the text to show up on the LCD.  A word takes virtually no time to process, but a sentence will take at least 1-3 seconds to process.  After the scroll bar reached 100% after about 2 seconds, the text showed up on the LCD.  Unfortunately, it didn't quite look like what was on the paper.  The recognition was quite bad and I thought to myself, something has to be wrong here, it can't be this bad!

So I scanned a few more things, and some were a bit better, but for the most part, there were a lot of errors in the recognition.  I put the thing away and said to myself, "I can't believe it's this bad"

In the following few days, I kept trying to use the thing and surprisingly it (or I) got better.  No, the device does not magically learn your hand movements and adapt to them, but *I* got better at scanning.  All it takes is practice.  That 97% accuracy they state is assuming that you scan almost perfectly.  It will compensate for slight variations in speed and movements that cause the text to stray from the center of the scanner, but for the most part, you have to be as perfect as possible to get good recognition.  And all it takes is some practice, after a while, most of the scans I was doing came out perfect.  The odd time it still did screw up, but more often than not, it worked pretty well. 

Scanning addresses, internet links and tables were all as easy as described on the previous page.  With the AutoAdvance option, it becomes really convenient to scan these types of data.

There is one additional thing you have to look out for which took me a while to get used to.  When putting the pen down on the paper, you have to position the pen quite a bit in front of the first character you are going to scan.  If you start the scan right at the first character, you will often find that the first character is always messed up. This goes for the end of your scan as well, scan past the last character and you should be fine.

To connect to a PC or laptop, all you need is a serial or Infrared port. For these tests, I used a serial port since I don't have an IrDA port.  All that is required is that your serial port be enabled and that you set the connection speed to 115,200bps. You can change the speed, but must make sure you set it to the same value on both the PC and the pen. Then you install the software, and it does a test to see if the communication is working or not and if it isn't, gives you some tips on what to try.

Now that you have communication, you choose one of the available modes, Scan To PC, QuickLink or PC-Controller Communications.

First I loaded up Word and enabled Scan To PC.  I then scanned in a sentence, and after a few seconds, voila! it was on the screen.  Of course, if you have a full sized scanner around, it would be much quicker to scan in text and use OCR software, but if you don't, this makes the job much easier than typing it all out.  Chances are you'll have to make a few corrections here and there, especially if you're moving fast, but it's a lot quicker and more fun than typing in my opinion.  I then loaded up Excel and scanned in some values to put in cells.  I like to have it automatically advance to the next cell, so I can quickly scan one thing after another.  You'll have to move down to the next row manually though. Overall, Scan To PC is a great feature to have on this pen and works great for doing research, scanning in points from different sources.

Now that I had some text, addresses and tables in the pen's memory. I wanted to try out the QuickLink feature.  When you choose QuickLink on the pen, all the data that is on your pen is synchronized with the QuickLink desktop software as well as any defined host applications such as Outlook.  In other words, it synchronized all emails addresses and notes with Outlook 2000, all URLs with Internet Explorer and all Table data with Excel.  Now, all my contacts were the same on my pen and the Outlook address book, the notes from the pen were placed in Outlook 2000 Notes section and Internet Explorer had a new folder in the favorites which stored all the URL's from the pen.  Tables were all stored in Excel format in a directory which I specified, it was very amazing and very quick.

The last communication function is the PC-Controlled Communications.  In this mode, you can add/remove components from the pen.  You can download upgrades from Wizcom's site and apply them to the pen.  You can also download new functionality such as connectivity to Palm Pilots or new language packs to add to the pen. Currently the pen works with 8 languages.  The interface is very intuitive and shows you what's currently on the pen and how much memory it's using.

The QuickLink Pen is a very exciting product.  It provides good optical character recognition in a very small package which provides a very good way to collect and organize data.  The pen has a wealth of features which all work very well and a top notch interface which is very intuitive and easy to use. The price is a bit high at $190, but considering the technology behind this little device, it's not hard to imagine why. To be able to compensate for the human hand's unpredictable and unstable movement is quite an accomplishment.  If Wizcom can perfect this technology and bring us 100% accuracy, they have a surefire winner on their hands.  In the end, it's a great device for people always on the road with laptops or Palm devices who like to stay organized and want to be paperless.

Hardware Pros Home Page