Gadget: Mobile Notes Pro

I’ve been procrastinating over writing my brother’s best man speech for a few weeks now. With the cursor on a blank Word document goading me with its ever blinking presence – I was keen to try a new approach.

Mobile Notes Pro from E-pens promises to minimise time in front of your PC by maximising time away from it. In a nutshell, it converts anything you write or draw into a digital file which can be uploaded to your PC and converted into text or image files.

There are two main components inside the box – a base unit with integrated clip to attach to the top of a pad of paper, and a wireless pen. The latter looks like any other pen apart from the two button batteries which slot in the top and the infrared panel running down one side. Once the base unit was powered on and I started scrawling my pearls of wisdom, a little icon appeared on the LCD screen to indicate that my eulogising was being digitised. Expecting something akin to a shaken Etch-A-Sketch when I plugged the base unit into my laptop’s USB, I was pleasantly surprised to find that every stroke had been captured perfectly.

The Mobile Notes Pro also has a Bluetooth mode compatible with Blackberry and Android smartphones. This allows live notes and sketches to be created and saved on your mobile. This doesn’t work quite as well, as the software struggles to scale A4 sketches down to size. There’s also a function to use the mobile pen as a wireless mouse and annotate directly into Microsoft Office. These gimmicks aside, and despite a few software installation foibles – I’m now one step closer to finally getting my speech finished.

• £119.99 from www.scanningpens.co.uk, for more information see www.e-pens.com