Reminds me of my old livescribe pen i had as an undergrad. It was a ballpoint-pen with a little computer inside and a camera pointing down the tip of the pen.

Reminds me of my old livescribe pen i had as an undergrad. It was a ballpoint-pen with a little computer inside and a camera pointing down the tip of the pen. You'd use it with special notebooks that had very small dot-patterns printed on the paper, and the computer could decode that to get its position on the page. Then you'd plug it into your PC's USB port to upload a digital copy of your notes. There was surprisingly-good OCR to make it searchable and also the pen had a microphone that recorded what your professor was saying during any given penstroke. And that's in addition to having the physical notebook the ballpoint pen wrote on. Looks like they still exist but they haven't done much in the last 15 years. They used to make these high-quality leather-bound notebooks but now it seems they only have cheap spiral-bound ones. Worse, the pen still costs about $200 so it's not in anyway competitive with remarkable. I'm contemplating going to grad school and I might try to dig up my old livescribe pen if I can find it (I think I saw it a year or two ago in some box of assorted odds and ends) but the lack of high-quality journals is a disappointment and if I can't find my old livescribe pen I'd rather try out remarkable than spend 10x as much on a nearly-dead product that had far more potential but seems to be on life-support. Wish livescribe would at least open-source their software if they no longer care about it.