Lenovo’s WRITEit Makes Digital Pens Truly Usable

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One of the long-held promises of tablet computing has been the idea that people should be able to make use of a digital pen to take notes that would then be transformed into text. While there has been no shortage of attempts to deliver that, the quality of the user experience has varied considerably.

This week, Lenovo announced that it is now trying to meet that challenge with the release of WRITEit, a Windows 8 application that runs on a select group of Lenovo devices to allow use of a digital pen to input data on the tablet and online forms.

Bill Bordogna, product owner of the contextual computing group at Lenovo, says WRITEit software can also be used as a front end to almost any application environment. The simple fact is that most people don’t type regularly or particularly fast. WRITEit provides a more natural user experience across a fairly wide number of application use cases, says Bordogna. For example, rather than having to use a physical or virtual keyboard on a screen, end users can use WRITEit to enter search terms directly in a browser to quickly search the web.

Bordogna says it still may take a little time for WRITEit to completely learn an individual’s handwriting. But when there is an issue, WRITEit will make a suggestion as to what it thinks the word might be.

Digital pens have always held a lot of potential, but they have never really been able to meet expectations. However, it’s starting to look like mainstream adoption of digital pens may finally be something worth writing home about.