ON SMARTPENS THAT FINALLY WORK

AT LONG LAST?

A pretty busy first day at the Wall Street Journal's D Conference in Carlsbad, CA today, as one can see by the rich discussions on Techmeme. 

The most interesting new product announcement from my perspective, was the Livescribe Smartpen, founded by the principals who brought us LeapPad from Leapfrog for our kids. 

The holy grail of pen-driven computing may finally yield something practical for mainstream users.

Here's how Gizmodo cuts to the chase:

"In a nutshell, the most critically cool thing it can do is link audio recordings you make as you jot written notes to the actual text you're writing.

And it can later all be indexed on a PC, and played back on the computer. Or by clicking on the notepad.

Completely useful for students, journalists, lawyers—anyone who takes a lot of notes. And it works."

There's a brief video of the demo at D on the D website.  But also useful are the animated videos explaining the various possible users of the gizmo on the Livescribe website.

The product is supposed to be available for around $200 later this year, and will require ongoing purchase of special paper coated with microdots that make the Smartpen work.

But this time, the dreamers may have figured out how to make this pen computing thing really work.