Why I buy this one ?
- Convert handwriting to text -- your handwritten notes will look as if they typed on a keyboard
- Easy editing -- Change color and width of your ink strokes, select portions to remove, combine handwritten documents or paste information to existing documents
- Search for words and phrases in your handwritten notes, by date, type of document or file name
- While in a meeting, add To Do items or schedule new meetings by simply writing them down
- Post-It notes and FranklinCovey's iScribe software and digital planning pages keep your new ideas and commets organized

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What our customer's say!

"Great for portable note taking", I have had this pen for 3 months and the pen works well as described. It is large so if you have small hands you might find this uncomfortable. The battery seems to last forever and the internal memory holds lots of pages. My concern is finding notebooks when the ones I bought run out. Also be prepared to spend several hours writing pages of jargon to train the pen to your hand writing. I use this pen to take notes and then find them at a later date by keyword search that's built into the software. Works well once it's trained. You can also do little tricks like create emails, calendar entries on your notebook so when you dock the pen it establishes calendar appointments, task lists etc... I don't find this feature very useful since it nevers seems to translate those entries correctly. The OCR software takes your notes and converts it to electronic text characters like MS Word but the pen really needs to understand your handwriting for this to work flawlessly. Admittedly, my hand writing is horrible and it still does a pretty good job. If anything, it helps you write neater so your notes are more legible. Again, the most useful feature to me is being able to use the key word search and finding something quickly anywhere in my notebook without scanning every single page manually. I also draw many diagrams (free hand) and it takes whatever you draw or write and populates it into the software which is nice if I want to distribute one of my drawings. I can just print them off. Make no mistake, if you draw crooked lines it does not straighten them for you. What you draw is what you get. The software only translates hand writing to electronic text. Overall, happy with the pen, the ink itself could be a bit smoother but it works about as well as any disposable pen and again it's a little bulky. Another nice feature is I can take my pen and notebook anywhere unlike many of the other items I found that require you to keep some type of adapter connected to a paper notebook and attached to a PC. This is a self operating pen until you dock and download it in it's supplied cradle.

"Great piece of gear, too bad it's dying technology.", I bought the Logitech io2 on a whim during a CompUSA closing sale, so I got a great deal on the device. My overall impression is that it's a "nice to have," but unless you're a manager or higher level administrative representative in a setting where you can get a larger order of them, it loses functionality.

1) I've tried at length to find different products beyond standard ruled paper for this thing, to no avail. At this point even a standard notebook would require special mail ordering, but if you know where to look, the costs can be defrayed. I bought a set of 15 "digital notebooks" with roughly 100 sheets each on eBay for about $15.00 USD + ~$10 shipping. In general, however, it's a very specialized piece of gear that demands very specialized parts -- no, you cannot write on normal paper or print out the "Anoto" sheets you need on your own. If I could just find a dayplanner that works with the pen I'd be able to justify the cost, but I can't

2) Let me reiterate that you must use specialized paper. My recommendation is that if you're willing to pay the price for the io2, you better be ready to pay for the XPaper program and extra paper (which runs at $15 for a ream of 100, by the way) so that you can print your own forms and have a good bit more functionality.

3) It seems like dead technology. Most of the excitement I've seen buzzing around this piece of gear seems to date back to 2005. Pretty much everything you see now developed for digital pen technology is all you can expect ever will be developed for digital pens; look over whats available closely, see if any of it will REALLY help you as an individual user, and then make the decision to buy.

4) Of course -- the high price now needs addressing. If you're prone to losing pens, getting pens stolen, etc etc... well, do not buy this pen. You're going to drop $150+ into a piece of gear you're going to have for about a month and a half before it gets stolen. Paranoia marks all my attempts to keep accountability of my pen.

5) It just doesn't write as well as I'd expect a $150 pen to write. I mean, it's a blue ink ball point BIC pen with a fancy camera on its nose. Don't expect something that writes as well as say, a gel pen or space pen. I did, and I was sorely disappointed. Which brings me to my next point.

6) Handwriting recognition. I won't even go into depth here. I just hope you have really, really neat handwriting. Like, your handwriting looks like you traced a typed sheet of paper.


All in all, I like it, but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. I work in a personnel administrative capacity, so it's heavily useful to me, but I think it'd be even more useful to say, a college student who needs to have his notes collected in one place. Imagine a college student who has digitized, searchable notes and who can e-mail his notes to a friend who missed the lecture in thier full, handwritten format -- footnotes, sidenotes, doodles and all. It has a lot of unrealized potential, and I wish I could exploit its functionality to its fullest, but I just cannot at my level and at the level of availablity of products that work with it.

"Quite Useful", I use it for all my notes at work. I never expect ANYTHING from handwriting recognition so I am not disappointed with their software, it's par for the course. The pen captures very detailed drawings that are easy to paste into other documents. I did have some trouble installing their software but it's been working for a year now.

"Better have neat handwriting", I have had this product for about 8 months. The truth about the handwriting to word document feature is that you have to have extremely brilliant handwriting in order to use the feature. I personally have mediocre handwriting, hence the reason I required the pen (so I could read my notes). When I tried to convert the handwriting, almost everything was changed into different characters. In addition, a few things must be noted concerning this product:
1) You cannot go back and change words that are already written
2) You must write on a special type of paper which is horrendously expensive
3) The pen is ridiculously large (I have large hands and still lacked the ability to hold the pen without getting hand cramps)
4) The pen writes like a low cost pen, which will cause trouble to users who prefer finer writing implements
5) There is only one learning session for the handwriting recognition, so the program will not advance with your handwriting

There are benefits of the pen; the image produced of the notes is very accurate (I used this when I lost a few pages of notes). The battery is long-lasting. Interface is very user friendly if you have some experience with computers.

I would not recommend buying this product as a student. In the business world it may hold more functionality due to its e-mail and other features that are compatible with Outlook (especially to those who do not enjoy typing). I was convinced this product was amazing at first, but my experience has had many pitfalls. If you do possess decent handwriting, I believe the product will work much better. Hope I could be helpful.

"Save time: Put the price in dollars in a shredder", I have been back and forth for weeks with Logitech Tech support and I still cannot get the darn software for this pen installed. The latest gem: uninstall my McAfee software and then try to install again. I don't think so. I have wasted hours on this usless product and now will just demand my money back. Don't even think about getting this clunker.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Needs help....", This is not a product you want to buy, It is hard to work with, the pen is way oversized, ect. Not to mention that Logitach io2 only allows one training session, thats all. and if something goes wrong with the training session, you're done for! Have you guessed? That is what happend to me. The mistake rendered the pen & software unusable.

"Solid technology", I bought the IO2 pen despite the rather subdued reviews here and I have to say that I am quite delighted.
- Size of the pen is not problem at all
- Handwriting recognition is working OK, but I don't really need it , as the IO2 search functionality is marvelous!
- Ample battery life and memory
- Price of special note books is OK
All in all, a very pleasant surprise.

"Good but not great yet", Version 2 is better then the first go at it. The pen is bulky, and does not fit in a pocket. There is not way to know how full the pen is.....

All in all.... I use it for meetings each week. I have bought a few as gifts for others.

"Great for note-taking setting, still room for improvement - ", I was looking for an alternative method than bringing a laptop to class because of carpal tunnel problems. I think this IO2 pen does a great job filling that duty for the following reasons, but there's also room for improvement:

PROS:
1. The pen battery and memory are sufficient for my needs - I am in 5 hours of class each day, and write approximately 20 pages of 8.5x11 notes, and the pen can handle that without going into the "red" on either the battery life or the memory, as long as I replace the cap when not writing.

2. It's faster than handwriting and then typing notes - transferring, correcting, and formatting 20 pages takes about 1.5 hrs each day, instead of many more to type them in.

3. It's user friendly. The training session is easy, and the software pretty much works with a few simple buttons. You open the software and it downloads the pages you've written, erasing them off the pen as it does so, then you select a page and pick one of three actions:
a) put the image of the page into an e-mail
b) put the image of the page into a word document (kind of like you scanned it in)
or c) CONVERT the page into editable text then put into word or an email. I always use this option, and what the software does is give you a 2-page layout with the scanned image on the left, the suggested typed text on the right, and then you correct it for errors before inserting it into a word document.

4. The "vibrating" factor isn't a problem - you feel a slight "hello-i'm turning on" vibration when you take off the cap, a quick double-buzz when you check the box to indicate you're done with a page, etc. Nothing too strange...

5. The paper isn't too much more than a regular notebook (nor does it look really strange) and can be ordered from a couple on-line stores pretty easily.

6. The pen does a good job recognizing both print and cursive, and if you add words to the dictionary it does better at your personal abbreviations or specialized terms.

7. The special appointment paper is great - you can check a few boxes and write text, sort of like old-fashioned carbon-copied phone message books, check a box saying it's an appointment or calendar item, and when you load the pen into your USB cradle it'll import that appointment into outlook automatically.

CONS:

1. MY BIGGEST PROBLEM WITH THE PEN IS WITH THE CONVERSION FUNCTION: IN ORDER TO RETAIN YOUR "FORMATTING," THE PROGRAM TENDS TO PUT THE TEXT YOU WROTE INTO A BUNCH OF ARBITRARY TEXT-BOXES SPREAD OUT ACROSS THE PAGE IN A WORD DOC, so the page is pretty much un-editable. Of course you've already edited for translation errors at the earlier step, but you can't really change the formatting of your notes into an outline or anything, because separate paragraps are in different textboxes. To get around this problem, as soon as you're done correcting the converted text, but before you click "put into word document", just highlight the text, copy it, and paste it into your own word document. You lose the formatting and have a bunch of extra carriage-returns, but it's better than trying to organize a bunch of text boxes on a page in WORD.

2. My second critique is the pen loads things PAGE BY PAGE - and every time you put a page in a word document, it opens a new document instead of adding a page to the first document, so you have to do some cutting and pasting to keep your notes together.

3. The pen is still a little TOO BIG. Granted I'm a woman with smaller hands, but I can't imagine how it must be to get the original IO, because this one is almost too big for me. I can barely manage to write with it comfortably, sometimes I have to take breaks.

4. The ink-cartridges are poor quality - I'm looking into getting a better refill, but the size seems unique so far. The pen pretty much writes like a cheap ball-point pen, which is depressing for someone who likes fine writing-utensils.

5. It takes quite a while to "upload" the docs from the pen to the computer, even with a USB 2.0 port. To deal with this, I usually just plug it in and let it transfer while I do other things.

6. You can go back and add text to pages before, but sometimes the pen is confused and so off-sets this text from the original text and you'll have to arrange your text-boxes to compensate and make the page look right.

7. The pen gets confused with diagrams because it tries to overlay shapes and text, and doesn't do so well. I find it's better to highlight any diagram and designate it a free-form drawing (this is pretty simple to do in the IO software before you use MyScript to convert the page), so the pen doesn't try to convert drawings.

8. The pen doesn't learn along with you. After the initial 30 min. training program, and disregarding the words you can add to the dictionary, the pen stops learning your handwriting.

9. The software that comes with the pen isn't really great at managing the documents. Each page is a separate document (even at the stage where you're in the .pen documents, before you even insert it into word or outlook).


OVERALL - I am fairly happy with my purchase because I really can't bring a laptop to class, and this does save time. However, I feel I still waste a lot of time fighting the formatting problems inherent in the software, so would like to see a new version of the software that doesn't do the stupid text-box trick. I don't think this pen would useful in the working world unless you couldn't bring a laptop to meetings or something.

The pen is pretty nifty and very easy to use if all you're looking for is a way to have all your notebook pages "scanned" into the computer, the problems really start with the conversion function.



"nice idea, but not there yet ", I tried the IO2 for three weeks at my work, using it in different note taking situations: internal meetings, client meetings, taking notes on articles, "thinking out loud" on new product designs on my own, and my other day-to-day activities. I still like the idea of the IO2 but the pen didn't work for me in these real-world situations. The pen is a bit fat for everyday writing, uncomfortable in your hand and therefore tiring. The handwriting recognition isn't good enough, even after training, for the variation in my writing in different situations (hurried at times and not at others, sequential at times and jumping around the page at others...). It struggles if you have any note-taking habits such as using graphics such as arrows to set off your notes, or shorthand such as initials for people's names or abbreviations for words. The pen doesn't allow you to go back on a page and cross out a word or clarify a letter or insert a word -- the text will show up on the digital page but it seems to confuse the heck out of the handwriting recognition. The software also doesn't seem to keep learning with you -- you train it and that is all it ever knows. Another small but irritating problem was that you can't use one page of paper for more than one digital "page" -- that is, if you write two sentences on a page and then want to use the rest of the page for another topic or meeting, you can't tell the pen to treat these as separate pages on the computer. All in all, a good idea, with great promise for the eventual IO4 or IO5, but not ready for real-world use if the handwriting recognition is critical to you.