When people have to take notes digitally they often rely on their smartphones and tablets. These devices are not indicative to a good note taking experience, but the Wacom Bamboo Spark is likely the best dedicated piece of hardware on the market. It came out around six months ago and not many people are aware that it exists.
The Bamboo Spark uses Wacom’s stylus input technology to allow the folio to capture the movement of the pen, allowing it to record images drawn by the user the pen and paper, effectively creating a digital copy of the drawing or other data as an image file for safe keeping or later editing.
The folio contains an EMR (Electro-Magnetic Resonance) board that works with the supplied Bamboo Spark pen, which also functions as a traditional ink pen. Using an A5-sized pad of paper, the board sits behind the sheets, recording the movements of the special pen. The battery is said to last for up to eight hours of continuous use, while the ink refills for the Bamboo Spark pen will apparently last for up to three months of typical use.
The exiting thing about this product is all of the notes you take are automatically synced to your smartphone or tablet.
A few days ago Wacom announced they have implemented one of the most requested features, handwriting to text conversion. This gives users the ability to write on paper, save their work to the cloud, using services such as Box, Dropbox, Evernote etc. It then will convert your handwriting into standardized text files.
This product is pretty sweet, and should be considered by anyone looking to buy the Sony Digital Paper, but doesn’t want to spend $700. You can buy the Bamboo Spark for $165 on Amazon.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
