The eReader killer app = eWriting

Life at work for all but the most hardened geeks still involves a fair amount of writing in a paper pad – either for capturing meeting notes, scribbling to-do lists, or sketching out conceptual ideas. Trying to hold a meeting whilst tapping away on a keyboard just doesn’t work if you want to (and I hope you do want to) maintain any non-verbal communication. We then waste time manually transcribing these analog notes into digital formats – or we can’t find  the time and those valuable notes cannot be referred to or shared. The doodled breakthrough diagram often gets lost for ever, because it would take too long to re-create in Powerpoint, or look bizarrely egotistical if we went to the trouble of scanning it. We then either throw away our old paper pads, or they collect, unloved and virtually unusable. This is all ripe for digitisation! The first tentative steps are being taken already – see this video demo of the forthcoming Plastic Logic reader with basic touch-screen annotation.  Fast forward to 2012 and I envisage eReaders with sophisticated stylus input devices and clever OCR software (as well as all the other good stuff – full form factor, colour, wireless) so that we’ll finally be able to digitise notes and sketches in real-time, making them easy to categorise, search, share, synch, etc. And that, my friends, will be a device truly worth keeping with on your person alongside your smartphone – and quite possibly replacing your laptop…