Logitech IO2 digital pen

The pen is mightier than the 'board.

If you need to take lots of notes, but find the idea of using a laptop or PDA for the task too sacrilegious, then a digital pen like this one might be the answer.

This chunky scribbler is based on the same Anoto technology used in the digital pens from Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Unfortunately, you have to use it with special digital paper that's been developed by Anoto. However, the quality of the notes it takes is excellent, with even very small details captured.

Also, certain pads of the special paper are printed with boxes that give the pen instructions on what to do once you dock it with your PC. For example, on the main jotter pad supplied in the pack there's a To line at the bottom. If you fill this in with an email address and tick the box marked Email, the note will automatically appear in your email application when you dock the pen.

Logitech has also included handwriting recognition software as part of the package. We had expected to spend hours training this up, but surprisingly, it was able to recognise most of our childish scrawl without any training at all.

Overall, we were pretty sceptical of this pen package before we used it, but it really won us over with its ease of use and impressive handwriting recognition. We just wish you could use it with normal notepaper rather than always having to have the rather expensive Anoto paper to hand.