Digital notepad - need help please

scottishchick27

Aldi are selling a digital notepad next Thursday for £49.99 and I was thinking about getting it for my OH for his christmas. He is a project manager and goes to a lot of meetings and I thought this would be a benefit for him. I've never heard of them so does anyone have any experience of these and does it do what is says on the tin?

Can it 'read' his handwriting and turn it into computer text ?

I think this is it.
Digital notepad - perfect for meetings, school, university, office, home ...
MEDION MD 85276

• Converts hand written notes and drawings to JPEG or TEXT format
• 32MB internal memory for up to 100 pages of notes
• SD/MMC card slot for expansion up to 2 GB
• Includes wireless electronic ball point pen
• Transfer your saved data to your PC/notebook using the USB cable (included)
• Works with standard DIN (high quality gloss) A4 paper
• Includes comprehensive software package and OCR (optical character recognition) program

• System requirements:
• 1GHz Pentium III processor or higher
• WINDOWS XP/Vista
• 64MB graphics card or higher
• 1 free USB 2.0 port
• CD-ROM drive

fwor

It doesn't get great reviews if you google for it. The manual is apparently poor and the handwriting recognition software is reported to have "about 80% success", which doesn't sound great to me.

Medion's support is reputed to be bad too, but you might get help from Waltop who seem to be the original manufacturer.

gairlochgal

Hi there

We trialled a product like this in my workplace and it wasn't a success. The handwriting recognition was too poor to be functional - our neatest writer could just about work with it, and it went badly downhill once he got tired or started writing very quickly. Is exciting concept but not there yet in my view.

Domokun

Things like this are generally too good to be true. If having handwriting/drawing ability by the desk might be any good, I'll happily recommend the Wacom Bamboo tablet.

scottishchick27

Thanks everyone for your help, you've just saved me £50 on something that would have been useless. I love this website.

Grover

I was bought this as an early birthday present by my wife, I'm also a Project Manager and need to write up copious amounts of notes. This, for me, is a very useful tool with a high recognition rate for my handwriting.

You train the software to recognise your handwriting and it will recognise single letters in upper and lower case but it does actually recognise joined up writing too. In fact, this is what I'm using it for the most.

Ok, I've only been using it for a day now but I would say that the recognition of my writing is over 95%. In fact, I’ve written this comment with it and have only had to correct one minor mistake which was more to do with my scrawl than the conversion process itself.:rotfl:

As your handwriting can be converted to computer text then it is just a matter of cutting and pasting into Word and then making the necessary amendments (if any). The pad can also save in pdf and other formats as an image.