Specs of Bookeen Cybook E-Ink reader

[HarryT]

If stylus input is important to you, I strongly suspect you'd be better off with a Tablet PC. Wonderful though eInk screen are for reading from, fast refresh rates are something that's hardly one of their strengths!

You could try asking in the "Iliad" forum - they are the chaps who have experience of this. I have a Sony Reader myself and they (very wisely, IMHO) made the decision not to go for a touch sensitive screen at all.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by cervezas

A question for the MobileRead eInk experts: In your opinion are any of the current crop of eReaders able to capture digital ink from a stylus sufficiently well that they are useful for taking hand-written notes? Last I heard, slow screen refresh rates created enough delay that the handwriting/drawing experience wasn't great.

Well, the refresh time is getting better. Real problem is that hand-written notes will eat up most of the battery.

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by cervezas

... are any of the current crop of eReaders able to capture digital ink from a stylus sufficiently well that they are useful for taking hand-written notes?

I believe that the only one for which this is even an option at the moment is the iLiad. I saw an iLiad last June/July and I think its screen/stylus would have done then for handwriting. True, there was a bit of a lag, but not bad, really. However, that opinion is a year-old and was hastily formed in the first place, so salt to taste.

The other side of the equation is that there's no software mechanism to do the HWR for you. One company (name slips my mind at the moment) announced that it was going to do some software for that purpose on the iLiad some months ago, but nothing yet.

[HarryT]

But you don't necessarily need HWR in order for digital ink to be useful. Eg, the Pocket PC has the option to store notes in "raw" digital ink, where it just stores (and later shows) literally what you write on the screen. Extremely useful for making quick notes, "doodles", etc. I use that a lot more than HWR. Similarly, the ability to be able to add hand-written annotations to displayed documents would be extremely useful, HWR or no.

[Hadrien]

iRiver's device is supposed to have a touch screen too, but we don't have enough information on this device yet.

[cervezas]

Originally Posted by HarryT

But you don't necessarily need HWR in order for digital ink to be useful. Eg, the Pocket PC has the option to store notes in "raw" digital ink, where it just stores (and later shows) literally what you write on the screen. Extremely useful for making quick notes, "doodles", etc. I use that a lot more than HWR. Similarly, the ability to be able to add hand-written annotations to displayed documents would be extremely useful, HWR or no.

Yeah, I'm more interested in ink than HWR. But Tablet PC has been a big disappointment as a note-taking device for me. By design it leaves it to the operating system to approximate or "improve" on where my pen touches the screen. I have to bear down too hard and get infuriating stray marks. It's just a bad experience.

My guess is that touch-sensitive eInk displays aren't the right answer yet because of the slow refresh rate, but I was curious to hear if anyone was trying to use them for taking handwritten notes since I know there has been progress on refresh rate.

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by cervezas

... I was curious to hear if anyone was trying to use them for taking handwritten notes since I know there has been progress on refresh rate.

I think there are a couple of folks who are doing this with their iLiads. You might want to pose that specific question in the iLiad forum, you'd probably get some good responses from them.

[yvanleterrible]

Or find yourself a Newton!

[nekokami]

I use my iLiad to take notes in meetings and in class. It works reasonably well. Though you can input handwriting in a small pop-up input field, there is no full-page HWR on the iLiad itself, though there's a commercial program sold by Vision Objects that runs on the PC, that supposedly will convert notes from the iLiad to text. I don't usually use a PC, so I haven't tried it. One of these days I'll try my Readiris OCR, which also supposedly will convert handwriting to text.

The iLiad does not "correct" your input in any way. The speed is ok. I don't find the display refresh rate to be a problem when writing notes, but creating a new page can slow me down. Because the iLiad uses a wacom screen with a special stylus, you don't have to worry about stray marks from your hand, watch, etc. Recent community developer efforts have enabled pen calibration and support for a 3-button stylus, though these still need some testing and smoothing out.

I have to say, the Newton was/is still the best portable electronic note-taking device created. Only the inconveninence of retrieving the data keeps me from continuing to use mine on a regular basis (I still pull it out every now and then).

[yvanleterrible]

Originally Posted by nekokami

I use my iLiad to take notes in meetings and in class. It works reasonably well. Though you can input handwriting in a small pop-up input field, there is no full-page HWR on the iLiad itself, though there's a commercial program sold by Vision Objects that runs on the PC, that supposedly will convert notes from the iLiad to text. I don't usually use a PC, so I haven't tried it. One of these days I'll try my Readiris OCR, which also supposedly will convert handwriting to text.

The iLiad does not "correct" your input in any way. The speed is ok. I don't find the display refresh rate to be a problem when writing notes, but creating a new page can slow me down. Because the iLiad uses a wacom screen with a special stylus, you don't have to worry about stray marks from your hand, watch, etc. Recent community developer efforts have enabled pen calibration and support for a 3-button stylus, though these still need some testing and smoothing out.

I have to say, the Newton was/is still the best portable electronic note-taking device created. Only the inconveninence of retrieving the data keeps me from continuing to use mine on a regular basis (I still pull it out every now and then).

How can it be that no one yet has been able to match the Apple Newton feat of 15years ago?

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

How can it be that no one yet has been able to match the Apple Newton feat of 15years ago?

Beats me. I still can't figure out why Apple stopped making them.

There are lots of aspects that current devices do better, but the handwriting for notes was the best of its kind.

[yvanleterrible]

Price was it's downfall, today's manufacturer has to deal with even more of that popularist spending stinginess. 'Me want all for nothin' The Newton was 700bucks at the time, I'd say approximately 1500today. That's only natural if you're a precursor assuming all that R&D. The handwriting recog software was Russian if I remember. Maybe Apple did not own it but licensed it.

But it's still curious that with every forgotten cent behind them they will not pursue a successor. The iPod has the computing capacity to do it, all it needs are a couple of 'ports' (If possible) Might to be that simple after all.

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

The handwriting recog software was Russian if I remember. Maybe Apple did not own it but licensed it.

You may have a point there ... although ... if it were owned by "not Apple" I'd think it would've popped up again in some other produce....

[nekokami]

The first version (Calligrapher) used software licensed from a Russian company, Paragraph International, but the more accurate version (Rosetta) was developed in-house by Apple. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton

[NatCh]

Ah, that would 'splain it.