Smart pens pit paper against touch screens

Tablets large and small are emerging as the definitive computing platform of the early 21st century, but they have a lot of growing up to do, not least
in the matter of input.

Apple's iPad offers little more in this respect than the earliest version of the format more than 5,000 years ago when people stuck a stylus into clay.

This limitation has been highlighted by the latest release of the Livescribe
Echo smart pen, which demonstrates how far touch screens fall short of the
best aspects of paper. It also raises questions about the viability of the
Windows 8 tablet edition previewed at Computex last week.

The pen's main selling point is the ability to capture anything you write, draw or hear. It can index speech, in effect, by synchronising a recording and notes of a conversation, so that when you touch any written word you can hear what was being said at the time of writing.

Microsoft's OneNote software can do the same trick on a touch-screen tablet rather than paper, but there's the rub: touch screens are dreadful to write on.

It's odd that the biggest obstacle to tablets moving beyond iPad-style content delivery could lie not in fiendish electronics but in something as apparently simple as screen texture. This is almost certainly why Microsoft's early groundbreaking Tablet PC, which had usable handwriting recognition, could not compete with laptops.

So paper wins hands down for texture. Its other obvious, and therefore taken for granted, advantage is creative freedom. You can draw or write anything, including maths expressions or obscure foreign scripts, without having to pull in this or that app or burrow into sub-sub-menus. There is no reason why a touch screen should not work in this way.

Paper has at least one useful feature that screens cannot match. It provides a tangible record of what was written, and incidentally one with a longer natural life than electronic data.

This written evidence could make an emailed Echo document (a 'pencast' in Livescribe language) preferable to a text email in some circumstances for legal reasons. Speaking words as you write them would stamp a document even more persuasively as a true record.

It would be possible to record on paper everything that is done on a computer in a hyper-secure environment. The Echo can control a PC from written commands; you can set up a shortcut so that, say, the letters 'EJ' mean 'Email Joe'.