Now plugged-in digital pen could replace keyboards

The high-tech industry has grappled for years with how to create some easier way to enter data into the machines.

Now a 4-year-old Israeli start-up has won backing from several major computer and mobile equipment makers recently for a digital pen that could provide the long-sought after alternative to keyboards and mice in new electronics.

The potential breakthrough from OTM Technologies Ltd allows mobile phone and handheld computer users to gather and edit text from various sources, play games and sketch drawings, even navigate a screen with mouse-like ‘point and click’ movements.

Digital pens also could replace other data-entry devices including trackball pointers, video game joysticks, virtual reality eyeball-tracking video cameras and even foot-controlled contraptions that serve as alternatives to hand-operated mice. OTM Technologies has lined up some heavy hitters who plan to work on the development of the new technology. They will use the pen, actually a stylus with a tiny optical laser reader at its point, for use in upcoming products.

Such pens would mark a break from the century-old key board that in its most popular form was designed to prevent typists from pounding keys too fast and jamming the hammers of a typewriter. They could also help computer designers, who have been confounded by the typewriter’s intractable size and immobility at a time when computer processors have been getting smaller, faster and more mobile.

Laser-based pens have been around in primitive form since the 1960s. Expensive, wired styluses have long been available for high-end graphic designers. But OTM’s technology promises to offer a low-cost digital writing instrument to the masses. OTM’s Virtual Pen, or ‘VPen,’ works on a variety of surfaces, from computer screen to paper, and even human skin. It offers freedom of hand motion, unlike a competing digital pen-and-paper combination from Anoto of Sweden which requires a special ‘electronic paper’ to recognise the pen’s movements.

OTM must overcome a legacy of failure for digital pens.Inventors have had difficulty matching the speed, accuracy and efficiency of a typewriter keyboard. And while consumers may encounter tethered electronic pens at a local bank or in the hands of a package deliverer, such instruments are awkward to use and produce barely legible signatures.

Due to the miniature size of its components and the low-power consumption of its tiny optical head, the OTM digital pen can be incorporated into handheld styluses alongside a regular ink-tip pen. But don’t expect to find OTM’s optical pen on sale as a stand-alone consumer product this Christmas.

Chastened by earlier industry failures, OTM has embarked on a patient strategy of winning over the world’s biggest mobile phone, handheld and consumer electronics makers first, allowing them to build the digital pen into a wide variety of products. That could create a far more ubiquitous presence for the pens, which could become a standard way for users to input data.

While analysts said OTM’s digital pen could also serve as are placement for computer mice or laptop touchpads, the company considers these markets to have matured to the point where they are unlikely to gamble on new methods of data entry. Instead, the sweet spot for digital pens may prove to be an emerging market for smart phones, hybrid devices that are half handheld computer and half mobile phone on steroids.

The appeal of such phones, which could sell tens of millions of units over the next several years, is that they give business users access to much of the data now only available on their office desktop computers. Digital pens represent a natural accessory for a smart phone user on the go. Last month in Germany, Motorola Inc., the world’s No. 2mobile phone maker, showed its latest line of mobile phones working with a wireless OTM pen, the first writing instrument for cellphones to operate on so-called Bluetooth networks.

Microsoft sees OTM’s digital pen as a more intuitive way to enter data into handheld computers and mobile phones using its software. At the CeBIT trade show in Germany, Microsoft showed off a Compaq iPAQ handheld linked to an OTM digital pen. (Reuters)