A Pen That Writes Your Novel For You?

Well...not really. (Thought I'd just bust chops, for a moment. :-))

Go to Leapfrog's website (here, as a matter of fact), and you'll see something called a FLY Fusion Pentop Computer.

From Leapfrog's website:

When you write with the FLY Fusion™ Pentop Computer on FLY™ Paper, everything is automatically captured and digitized. You can then upload it to your PC and convert to text. Touch your pentop computer to FLY Paper, and you can quiz yourself on history, get help with a quadratic equation, or even play your favorite MP3. And when you're ready for new software, simply connect to your PC again to purchase and download custom homework and gaming applications directly to your FLY Fusion Pentop Computer.

I don't know what the price tag is, but I imagine, since it has some sort of computer components in it (i.e., tech stuff), it probably isn't cheap.

It actually looks kind of cool; I love getting a trying out unusual things, pens included. I have one right now, from a travel fair here at work last year. It's not much, but it has this neato airplane thingy on it (it does say Virgin Atlantic on it, so that's no surprise).

A Cool Pen I Had Well Before the Techie Stuff Showed Up

I remember a pen I had growing up, and I thought it was really neat. Still do. Wish I still had it. Anyway, blue and white were entwined on the pen's surface so that the white parts looked like clouds and the blue parts looked like blue sky.

What was really cool about it was a moveable rocket on it. (This was in the 1970s, so all sorts of space-age, NASA-type stuff was in.) I turned the pen upside down, the rocket thingy would slide down the pen; obviously, it would move in the opposite direction when I turned it right-side-up again.

Yeah, I know: It's amazing what keeps people enthralled, lol.

But Getting Back to the Computerized Pen...

Besides the price (which, again, I don't know about, but am guessing it's expensive), the other downside is having to buy special paper. This is akin to buying an inkjet printer, which is fairly cheap nowadays, but having to pay through your teeth for the ink cartridges. I could see it becoming an expensive operation to have to buy special paper (and the blurb on the website says you MUST use the special paper in order to write with the pen).

So...will this catch on? My gut tells me it won't, but what do I know?

Interesting, though.

~Nancy