HARDWARE
You've got the laptop printer. Now C Technologies brings your mobile office the C Pen, a portable OCR scanner. It looks and feels like a highlighting marker, but instead of laying down fluorescent ink, it picks up printed text in any of 10 European languages, storing up to 2 Mbytes. You then point the back end of the C Pen at your laptop PC's infrared port to transfer the text.
The unit seems like toy tech - until you come across a valuable passage in a newspaper or book, with nary a copier in sight. The C Pen can pull loads of text out of the Times (or copy the secret memo on your boss's desk) with only a rare bout of gibberish. Caveat: You must scan line by line. And the C Pen won't read handwriting, though you can enter text via a Graffiti-like alphabet.
After some initial fumbling, I got the unit to work, slowly, on most office documents. In fact, the only thing the C Pen outright refused to read was an iMac troubleshooting guide. But don't we all?
C Pen 200: $200. C Technologies: (800)275 2736, www.cpen.com.
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