A part from the general lack of flying cars, monorails and Lurex spacesuits, the technology we enjoy in the second decade of the 21st century is far in advance of — or at least different from — anything we expected.
One odd throwback, however, which you wouldn't have given a chance of surviving to 2011, is typing. The fact that we do all our amazing modern stuff on keyboards designed in the Victorian era is astonishing to me. Indeed, the fact that the written word has survived at all when we have so many alternatives is rather remarkable. U can say wot u like abt the illiteracy of successive generations, but there's probably more being written now in emails and texts, however wonky the grammar and spelling, than there was 50 years ago in letters. And even though the words I'm writing here may seem stilted and antique in 50 years time, the probability is that our descendants will be able to read them — should they come across them in the snowdrifts of digital words we are blizzarding down for posterity.
But what has been exercising me lately is not typing, but its predecessor, handwriting. Handwriting as a note-taking tool is back. It's a crude old technology, of course, and barely has a role in today's business environment. So at many conferences and meetings these days, people tap away at a laptop or iPad like stenographers. To those not typing, this seems both oddly isolating and noisy.
Tablet computers, both in their first (failed) incarnation a few years ago, and in their more successful post-iPad revival, have always implicitly promised a revival of handwriting recognition technology. The long-forgotten Palm Pilots and other palmtops of the decade before last accordingly had a stylus and offered the opportunity to see your scrawl converted into type. The even more forgotten Apple Newton PDA had the same.
Spool forward 15 years and a defining feature of the iPad, much commented on when it was launched, was that it didn't have a stylus or built-in handwriting recognition. (You can buy a few handwriting recognition apps for the iPad but, since you have to use a finger as the 'pen', they're not very useful or popular.) But now Fujitsu has brought out a quite splendid iPad-style tablet specifically for business, the Stylistic Q550 (fujitsu.com), which comes with a stylus and has many admirable qualities, among them, truly workable handwriting recognition integrated with Microsoft Office — the Stylistic is a Windows 7 machine. This feature makes note taking on a computer silent, fast and pretty reliable. I've tested it and, if I keep my horrid scrawl under control, it makes a serious fist of translating writing directly into type.
Now, while the Stylistic's handwriting recognition is a welcome, if retro, development, another new handwriting gadget called the LiveScribe Smartpen (livescribe.com/uk) is revolutionary. It's a rather fat pen costing as little as £100 that records every word you write. Once you've finished note taking by hand (using special LiveScribe pads), connect the pen via USB to your PC or Mac, and the notes are transferred to the computer. You then have a permanent record of your notes, but there's more. You can then search the notes for keywords and transcribe them to type, if you have neat writing. Better still, the LiveScribe can audio-record what's being said as you write it. So when you go back through notes taken days or months ago, you can instantly hear the meeting as it was — just touch the pen on any bit of scribble and the recording goes straight to the soundtrack of that moment. It's one of the rare business 'solutions' that really solves something, and it could be the one, even more so than the Fujitsu Stylistic, which brings handwriting back.
Follow Jonathan Margolis at twitter.com/SimplyBestTech.
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