This post redefines "delayed response," but this one is a goodie.
Walter Mossberg's review of the Crosspad (4/9/98, WSJ)....
April 9, 1998
The CrossPad Sends Notes
To the Screen of Your PC
MOST DOCUMENTS used in business, law, academia and
journalism today are written and laid out on computers. But it can be
awkward to use computers to take the notes on which these documents
are based.
Personal computers are often an
unwelcome intrusion during meetings,
phone calls and at libraries. Their
keyboards are noisy, they tend to beep
and crash and, in the case of laptops, they
often run out of battery power. Small hand-held devices like the PalmPilot
try to get around some of this by allowing you to jot notes on the screen
with a pen, but their writing surface is cramped and their memory limited.
Walter S. Mossberg answers selected computer and technology
questions from readers in Mossberg's Mailbox. If you have a question you
want answered, or any other comment or suggestion about his column,
please e-mail Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.
So, many computer users continue to resort to paper and ink for taking
notes. Even at the most elite computer-industry conferences the number of
people taking notes on PCs and other digital devices is still surprisingly
small.
Now, however, there's an ingenious new product that tries to bridge the
gap between paper and computer. Called the CrossPad, it's an electronic
clipboard that holds standard paper legal pads and lets you take notes on
them with pen and ink.
Unlike regular clipboards, however, the CrossPad silently stores your
notes in digital form as you write them. It then permits you to upload those
notes -- up to 50 or 100 pages at a time -- via a thin cable to any
Windows Pentium-based PC. Once stored, notes can be viewed as
images of your own handwriting or converted to editable computer text.
You can organize the notes into electronic notebooks by topic or date,
and search for specific passages by key words, dates or electronic
bookmarks that you can insert while taking notes. And you still can keep
your paper notes as a backup.
THIS $399 INVENTION comes from A.T. Cross, the 150-year-old
maker of fine pens based in Lincoln, R.I. International Business Machines
designed the software. The sleek, black device uses a special Cross pen
that has a regular ballpoint ink tip and a radio transmitter behind the ink
cartridge that beams your pen strokes to the electronic clipboard for
storage.
The CrossPad isn't tethered to a computer, except for the few minutes
needed to upload your notes. So, you can tote pen and pad anywhere.
Both run on standard alkaline batteries, which the company says last for
months. The CrossPad comes with extra ink cartridges housed in a little
drawer built into the side. The overall design is elegant, not geeky. It
weighs about two pounds, is only three-fourths of an inch thick and can
use any small legal pad -- the 8.5-inch by 11-inch size.
After a few days of testing out a CrossPad, I found it works well, with
some caveats. The IBM-supplied software installed quickly and easily,
and the uploading process was speedy and simple. The electronic
clipboard itself has a clean, easy user interface. Just below the legal pad,
there's a small area with six oval-shaped depressions, marked by icons.
Tapping on these with the pen allows you to turn pages electronically -- to
correspond with the turning of pages on the paper pad -- and to engage
various functions, such as uploading text. A little screen in the middle of
these controls displays page numbers and menu prompts.
The electronic image of my handwritten notes
was generally faithful and readable, though in
some cases I found that the CrossPad cut off
long downward strokes or failed to fully close
loops. Using the IBM software, called Ink
Manager, you can delete sections of the
handwritten image, move words around,
highlight portions in yellow, turn selected words
bold, or even draw in new words and pictures
with the mouse.
A PARTICULARLY nice feature is the key word system, which allows
the computer to search for topics, even in the captured handwriting. If you
circle a word on the legal pad and tap one of the controls on the
CrossPad, the computer will designate that particular word a "key word"
and translate it into text that it can later retrieve when you ask it to search
for topics. If it can't translate the key word, it asks you to type it one time
on the PC.
Overall, however, the software that converts handwriting to computerized
text works poorly, and that's the biggest drawback to the CrossPad. Even
after going through the required 45 minutes of handwriting practice, I
found the system made way too many errors in translating my lousy
penmanship to be useful.
So I recommend that prospective buyers view the CrossPad mainly as a
means to archive images of handwritten notes and sketches for convenient
storage and searching, rather than as a way to convert lots of handwriting
to editable computer text.
There are a few other small problems. The software can become confused
if you forget to turn the page electronically when you start a new page on
the paper pad. The ink cartridges are small, because half the pen is taken
up by electronics, so they last only 50 pages or so and refills cost about
$1. Extra pens cost $80, though your first spare is half-price when you
register for the warranty.
The orientation and setup guide, which comes in the form of a special pad,
is exceptionally clear and useful. But there's no complete printed manual,
only an electronic one that requires Adobe's Acrobat software to read,
and which I found awkward to use. This is a cheap move in a $399
product that's supposed to be classy.
Even with those limitations, though, the CrossPad is a cool device that
solves a real problem.
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