It's no larger than a normal pen, despite the hardware

Oct 21, 2014 13:32 GMT  ·  By

Smartpens have been in development for a few years, and the Neo N2 from NeoLAB Sydney Studio may just be the most advanced model yet, both because of how it works and for its internal storage capacity.

Smartpens in the past have had one or more special abilities, but they all revolved around the ability to automatically perform handwriting recognition and convert what you write into virtual format.

Some used a camera sensor, or something similar, to basically record it visually, others tried to do the same using motion sensors. Others relied on special paper to help do it for them.

The Neo N2 smartpen we're about to look at does everything all those other pens could do, but without most of the drawbacks.

The Neo N2 smartpen

First off, the pen can work completely independently. Sure, it can be synced to Evernote or otherwise connected to a PC or mobile device via an app, but it doesn't need them.

You can write around 1,000 pages before the internal storage space of the pen fills up. After that, it's a pretty simple matter of offloading the data to a device and starting again.

All the pages are archived according to date, location and page number, so you can always find what you're looking for.

And no, you don't need to perform any strange preparations before the writing recording function kicks in. Just put the tip on the paper and start scribbling. All this without the Neo N2 measuring more than a regular pen of 6.16 x 0.46 inches / 156 x 12 mm.

The only drawback is that you'll need special notebooks for the writing to be recognized and properly read. Fortunately, the notebooks don't cost more than regular ones, so that shouldn't be a problem unless you prefer standard A4 sheets for your notes.

Provided you order them straight from the source that is, since you won't be able to just pick them up from corner stores.

Availability and pricing

The Neo smartpen N2 is not strictly available yet, although you'll get one soon if you participated in the crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

The device has already raised well in excess of ten times the minimum goal, so you can be sure the device will enter retail soon. You'll probably have to pay around $100 / €100 for the pen and one notebook, a bit more to cover shipping costs outside of Australia.