aNewDomain.net — The Equil Smartpen is a Bluetooth paper-to-digital pen we’ve reviewed favorably here at aNewDomain. Execs demoing the pen at the Luxury Technology Show 2014 in New York City today — that’s Mar. 4, 2014 — say the nifty little gadget is now integrated with Evernote.
Previously, your Equil Smartpen notes went from paper or any other surface to digital form — via Bluetooth — to be stored on any number of disparate computers and Apple iOS devices.
Evernote integration means that Equil Smartpen owners will now automatically have a central repository to store and browse anything they’ve ever written with the pen.
The Equil Smartpen, announced in late 2013, is an intriguing device, as our reviewers determined back in January.
The Equil Smartpen is designed to let you jot in a notebook or on top of any other object — or in the air, even — and transfer the motions to an Apple iPad, Apple iPhone or other computer. The system ran well and quickly. Pairing was fast. But once you transferred your notes to more than one location, finding them was the obvious challenge.
The Equil Pen deal with Evernote, as announced today, fixes all that.
To use the Equil Pen with Evernote, you still need to download the free apps Equil Note and Equil Sketch from the App Store. But you don’t have to worry about setting it up to store on Evernote. It’s now automatic. Your notes get a home that’s easy to search whenever you need to find them.
In a statement at the Luxury Technology Show 2014, the president of Equil Americas, Greg Appelhof elaborated:
Our digital lives often eradicate the need for handwritten content, but we all know that the best ideas often start on paper … (with) the Equil Smartpen (and new Evernote integration) … handwritten notes now get saved to Evernote seamlessly … (and there is) never a need to dig through stacks of old notebooks to find lost (notes or) that key gem again.”
So how does the Equil Smartpen work? As we’ve explained in our review earlier this year, the Equil Smartpen is a collection of clever technologies that employ infrared and ultrasound waves to figure out where the pen is on the paper, virtual or real, at any given moment.
It then sends information via Bluetooth to the pen and its paired receiver at the rate of 80 transmissions per second. Tilt doesn’t matter either, our reviews showed, and it works impressively fast. Better yet, it works as well for left-handed writers as it does for right-handed ones.
Each pen and its paired receiver carry a unique ID, so device interference with other Equil Smartpens in the vicinity isn’t an issue.
Equil Smartpens are available for about $150 at Apple Stores, on Amazon and via the MyEquil.com site. The free Equil iOS apps you need to make them work — Equil Sketch and Equil Note — are in the App Store now.
The firm behind the Equil Smartpen, San Carlos, CA-based Luidia, has been designing and manufacturing various digital capture devices and services in the education, business to business, and business to consumer markets for just over a decade. In December 2013, it became part of the Korean PNF Co., Ltd. Its patents, presumably, lie intact in Luidia.
Our reviewers will be evaluating the Equil Smartpen as integrated with Evernote here at aNewDomain in the near future. In the meantime, keep an eye on aNewDomain for continuing coverage of the March 4 debut of the Luxury Technology Show 2014. Our Alfred Poor and Allen Green will be delivering video coverage of the show for aNewDomainTV in the near term, too.
Stay tuned. For aNewDomain.net, I’m Gina Smith.
ed: Reporter Audrey Ewing also contributed to this story.
Special thanks to reporter Audrey Ewing on this breaking story from New York
thanks all!