May/June 2004

Destiny Wireless is spearheading the marketing drive in the uk

Could digital pens represent the fourth generation of modern computing? That's certainly the belief Destiny Wireless wants to foster; and it has taken what could be a significant step towards expanding acceptance of the concept by signing a partnership deal with BT.

Destiny is a new start-up company, created last year to work as the exclusive agent for the Swedish-based Anoto company in the UK, South Africa and Australia. Its current objective is to appoint resellers in all these markets, whilst also supplying pens and accessories and helping with application development and implementation.

Anoto for its part is the powerhouse behind the current drive to bring pen computing into the business mainstream. Its technology has been adopted by a wide range of hardware manufacturers such as Hitachi, Logitech, Maxell, Nokia and Sony Ericsson.

 

The Anoto system allows remote workers to tick boxes on forms or enter freehand text, storing data which is then either transmitted back to the their base immediately via a GPRS or GSM link, or held in the pen's on-board memory and downloaded in batch mode later.

At a seminar held recently to promote the deal with Destiny Wireless, Dr Leslie C Saward, commercial and brands direct at BT, positioned pen computing at the leading edge of a sequence of earlier technologies (desktop computer, laptop and handheld).

He saw numerous benefits in the system over earlier technologies - not least of which was a very low cost of just £125 per pen. The pens had a 1 megabyte memory, he pointed out - "enough for a hundred A5 sheets of paper" - and current battery technology allowed about two hours' writing time.

The system required special paper with a very fine dot pattern, but this added only "2 to 10 per cent" to the price of equivalent ordinary paper. Suppliers already included leading names such as 3M, Charles Letts, Esselte, Hamelin and John Dickinson.

Edward Belgeonne, Destiny's managing director, later explained that the dot pattern was effectively different for every sheet - being drawn from a master pattern "that would cover the whole of Europe and Asia if you spread it out." This made it easier for users to provide a clear audit trail, which was also helped by the fact that each pen had a unique identity.

BT's Dr Saward acknowledged one possible drawback with the system - the fact that it had no screen, and hence no inbuilt capability to provide users with visual feedback. "In some ways it's half a PDA," he commented - a point underlined by the fact that the pens actually run an embedded version of the Windows CE operating system.

However, Edward Belgeonne pointed out that the pens could give audible or tactile feedback to show that commands or other input had been recognised, and also said that when the pens were used in conjunction with mobile phones, the display screen of the phone could effectively double as the pen's display screen. This capability would be further developed in future, he said.

The pens link with phones by Bluetooth 1.1 wireless connection, although Dr Saward warned that not all models of phone were currently compatible. Among those that were, he cited Symbian-based phones and included models by Sony Ericsson and the Nokia 3660, 6000 and 7650.

Worldwide, Dr Saward reported, early users of the Anoto system included FedEx, which had chosen them to replace 1,000 PDAs in the Far East; and DHL, which had also introduced them on some operations instead of ruggedised PDAs. Avon Cosmetics was using them for order-taking, and Volvo had adopted them for rapid prototyping.

So far the pens can't be used for conventional barcode reading, although one or two potential users at the BT presentation felt this would be a benefit. "It requires more modification than might appear," Belgeonne said, pointing out that the tiny on-board camera read only a very small area of the paper. "But we've fed this point back to Anoto." He thought a barcode-capable version should appear by 2006.