Dane-Elec Zpen

There are some situations in which laptops are impractical, when it's easier to use a good old-fashioned pen and paper.

But loose sheets of paper are much more susceptible to loss or damage than documents stored on a PC.

Scanning those handwritten notes into the computer is one answer, but this is time-consuming. Enter the Zpen: it looks like a futuristic bulldog clip with a USB connector on one side and a row of three lights and two buttons on the front.

To use the Zpen for the first time, connect it to a spare USB port on the computer and leave it to power up (it charges over the USB connection) for six hours. Then clip it onto the top of a pad of paper and write with the included ‘digital’ pen. The pen is slightly larger than average, but it uses a normal ballpoint refill and is otherwise pretty much indistinguishable from a conventional pen despite the technology it houses.

When a page has been filled, the user unclips the device from the top of the current page and attaches it to the next, which tells the Zpen to register a page break. If you need a longer break it can pause writing through its pause button at which point the pen will retain what you have written during that session in its 1GB memory – enough for hundreds of pages.

When you have finished writing, the device can be connected to a PC and the handwritten notes transferred to be viewed using the included Pen and Ink Viewer program. This runs directly from the device so it can be used on any computer without installation. We found that our notes appeared slightly skewed but they were still perfectly legible. The program has a delightfully uncluttered interface and allows notes to be viewed and exported as PDF files.

The other program bundled with the Zpen will convert the handwriting to editable text, but if your handwriting isn’t neat it will return gibberish. Although the results weren’t perfect, following the included training procedure improved things to the point where it was usable.