Do you still use handwritten notes?

Typing while talking to someone is socially awkward - and certainly not something I would consider doing during a client meeting. It's also not the greatest way to capture a mixture of notes, diagrams, arrows joining up thoughts and so on.

So what do most of us still end up doing? Use handwritten notes in a notebook. Are there any alternatives? Well there's always a tablet PC, but I don't see this as being that much better than typing on a laptop. It's still a little bit of a performance to pull it out and start notetaking.

I stumbled across this the other day, the Logitech io2 Digital Pen.

For those of you who like to keep things simple. It's basically just a pen. It works, well... just like a pen. But it captures your writing and doodles (up to forty pages worth), and you can synchronise it with your computer later, so that you can add the notes to client records etc. Much better than having to spend time searching back through your notebook for an important bit of information. Add to that handwriting recognition software and you're seriously in business.

For round about £90 quid on Amazon, you might consider it to be a very expensive pen, or perhaps a very reasonably priced way to keep yourself that little bit better organised in 2007...

As with everthing in life, there is a catch however - the pen only works with special paper. But the paper is fortunately reasonably priced and comes in a variety of familiar formats, including "Black 'n Red" notebooks.