By Oo Gin Lee

IF YOU are a student, journalist or anyone who needs to take copious notes and store them digitally, this pen could be your magic wand.

No exaggerations here - it's like a computer, complete with software, microphone, speaker, 2GB flash memory and a mini camera - all squeezed into a device the size a giant Montblanc pen.

Use it to record audio while scribbling down notes at the same time. Get this - you can use it to bookmark your recording against your written notes. Say, you have written the word 'cool' on the third line of your text. Tapping on that would cause the pen to jump to that part of the recording when the word 'cool' was written.

The tiny built-in speaker produced surprisingly good audio playback and you can always plug in the ear-piece for greater clarity.

The magic lies in a tiny camera embedded under the tip of the pen and the special paper which has a million dots in every square inch. As you write with the pen, the camera remembers exactly on which dots each stroke appears while the microphone records the audio at the same time.

The 2GB flash memory is good for 200 hours of recording. Don't worry about running out of space. Place the Pulse on its USB dock and connect it to your PC to download your data. You will see a digital replica of your handwritten notes, like a beautiful scanned document, embedded with the audio recordings.

Click your mouse on your digital notes to imitate the effect of tapping the Pulse on the words to jump to the audio bookmark. You can even search within the page for written words. So, if you want to quickly jump to the part of your notes when you wrote the word 'juxtaposition', just key it into the search bar and all occurrences of the word within the page will be highlighted.

Now, for the fun things.

You can make music, translate words into different languages and do calculations on it.

In calculator mode, you could write, say, '14 + 15 =' and 29 will appear on the LCD display on the pen. Similarly, switch to translator mode and write the word 'one' on paper and the foreign language equivalent is read out. Note, however, that the dictionaries cost extra and they are not available here yet.

In music mode, the 'piano' feature is sure to grab your attention. The pen will instruct you to draw nine vertical lines then join the top and bottom. This creates nine cells.

Then, write the letters 'I' and 'R.' After that, just tap on the cells - the keyboard you just created - to make your own music. You can switch between several instruments like the flute, piano and drums by tapping on the letter I. You can add rhythm by tapping R.

The notepads cost $50 for four 200-page letter-sized pads and the ball-point pen refills go for $10 for three.

FINAL SAY

Forget your voice recorders and tablet PCs. This is much, much cooler.

This article was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life on Sep 17, 2008.

For more The Straits Times stories, click here.