HARDWARE
The Gist: Sketchbook Meets Notebook
$2,995
I once worked for a CEO blessed with the ability to quickly sketch out ideas with pen and paper. He was an architect by training, but he couldn't spontaneously bring his freehand talent to the computer; the mouse was too restrictive for the flourishes his visual sense demanded.
Enter the TransNote: a laptop and sketch pad combined. To your right (or left, in the version for southpaws), neatly clipped inside the unit's smooth leather case, sits a combo ballpoint pen and stylus. You write, doodle, and sketch on an ordinary pad of paper, while the pen's embedded radio transmitter (powered by a single AAA battery) invisibly beams its every move to memory, sandwiched inside the ThinkPad's base. The laptop itself needn't be booted up while you're using pen and paper, because the pad's 2-Mbyte onboard memory automatically saves up to 30 pages of notes.
As soon as you open the Ink Manager program installed on the ThinkPad, it reads what's on paper. Little software helpers make it easy to keep track of handwritten to-do items and calendar reminders by pegging the chicken scratch to the appropriate date and time. The only catch to all of this inky-thinky slickness is what you actually get on the digital side of the leather-bound divide: handwritten scribbles onscreen. It does not translate your writing into text that can be used in word processing or email.
Of course, with TransNote, you're getting a top-notch laptop, too. Running this amped-up Etch A Sketch is a 600-MHz Pentium III with built-in Ethernet, a modem, and a 10-Gbyte hard disk. In addition to a PC card slot, it has a CompactFlash dock for quick-loading images from your digital camera. The whole shebang weighs only 5.5 pounds, and though the 10.4-inch display is a little on the small side, it also functions as a touchscreen and can flip around for use as a mini conference-table presenter or lay flat to work like a tablet.
As a writer, I would have no use for the TransNote's sketching capability. I'd need my scrawlings converted to text. My old boss, though, could invent on paper to his heart's content, dragging his little depictions into proposals typed up on the ThinkPad's keyboard.
IBM: www.ibm.com.
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