Hands-on Review: G-Note 7100, a Digital Note Taker

Sometimes there's no substitute for handwriting. Good note-takers will scribble in the margins, draw diagrams, and use arrows. Engineers, chemists, architects, and musicians are just a few of the folks I can think of for whom keyboarding is like doing their job with handcuffs on. The G-Note 7100 from Kye is one of the more interesting and less expensive solutions to the problem of taking handwritten notes that I've seen. You can think of it as the poor man's tablet PC.

The tablet costs $159 and is the size of a large clipboard. It's thin and light, and because it runs on batteries (four AAAs) you can take it with you anywhere. To take notes, all you do is place a sheet of plain old note paper on the clipboard and turn the unit on. The special pen makes contact with a grid on the tablet that records all of your notes as pages of images. (The unit has 32MB of memory.) When you've completed a sheet it's saved into the tablet's memory.

To get the notes out of the tablet and onto your PC, you use a USB transfer cable. A program called Digital Organizer opens your document and provides simple tools for you to view, edit, annotate, and save your files as either images or PDFs. You can even send them as email. The tools let you mark up a document, highlight, and underline, too.

A second software package included on a trial basis with an option to buy is MyScript Notes for U. It includes OCR software that will recognize your handwriting and convert it to a word-processed document.

While the hardware works really well, especially for the price, the package does have some shortcomings. Documents get stored as separate pages; up and down arrow keys scroll through the page numbers, but there's no on-screen display of the content. You don't know you've captured anything until you load the pages onto your PC.

The software interface that comes with the program is minimal. On my version, the word "Trial" was misspelled as "Trail." And nowhere in the on-screen documentation did it differentiate between the capabilities of the Digital Organizer and the MyScript Notes for U. I had to call the manufacturer to give me an overview of which software did what. Finally, the software did not work with MS Vista despite claims it was Vista compatible. It had no trouble running on XP.

That said, if you're a serious note taker, or if you're out on the road scribbling as you go, or you just can't afford a tablet PC, this form factor is terrific and it works reasonably well. I'd love to see Kye do a bit more on the user interface or create a nice environment like Microsoft's OneNote. Then it would have my endorsement as the most novel note-taking product of the year.

Bottom line: If you're willing to put up with a bit of frustration (and you can hang onto the two special pens—the only pens that work with the tablet) you'll like this digital note taker a lot.