APEN is allowing us to digitize every single thing that we write without going through the painful process of retyping everything or scanning it into a computer. The creators at APEN have rolled out a new version called the A4 Digital Pen. The APEN A4 Digital Pen now lets you work directly with iOS devices such as the iPod Touch, iPad and the iPhone. You just turn on the pen’s receiver and write with it like you would normally do with an ordinary pen. The difference this time is that the receiver can now transfer stored writings directly to the iOS device through a 30-pin cable, and you no longer need a computer to do this!

The APEN A4 can store up to 100 pages in its own memory and it also has a photo sketcher feature to allow annotations of words or drawings on computer images. The A4 digital pen is now available for $129.99 USD. The makers say that it works well with Mac OS X 10.5, Windows XP or newer versions and iOS 3.0 and above.

[UberGizmo via APEN]

The post APEN A4 for iOS Unveiled: Makes Your Scribbles Digital appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Smartpen manufacturer Livescribe last week announced the release of the new Wikipedia app for their Echo and Pulse pens. Once downloaded to the pen, the app lets you search through offline abstracts of the 100,000 most-visited English-language Wikipedia articles using your pen and pad as the interface: Simply write the name or subject in the “dot paper” notebook and tap the word with the tip of the pen and the information is at your fingertips.

The app description is a tad vague, but assumably once the word is tapped and an article is chosen on the pen’s tiny OLED display, the information will be either scrolled across the screen or spoken aloud using the pen’s speaker as is par for many apps.

Livescribe, formed in 2007 by ex-Leapfrog employee Jim Marggraff, has been making smartpens since 2008 capable of recording interviews, doing calculations and transferring notes and sketches from the dot notebook to a computer, among other things. Their pens and platforms have won numerous awards over the last three years, including the Macworld Best of Show Award and the SIIA Ed Tech’s Most Innovative Education Product Award in ’09.

The Wikipedia app costs about $2 in the Livescribe app store, alongside other notable (no pun intended) app names such as Evernote and the American Heritage Spanish Dictionary.

[SlashGear via LiveScribe]

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