Pens with accelerometers have been around for a couple of years. The idea is that as you write, the pen records your scritching and stores — or sends — the motions to a device that converts them to a bitmap and, sometimes, employs handwriting recognition to convert the bitmap to text. The effect is of writing with a pen on paper and having it appear on a nearby (or even distant!) computer. Smart whiteboard markers were the rage a couple of years ago, employing the same tech — a sensor "cap" on the ass-end of the marker that coverted whiteboard scribbles to save-able images.
This Wired News story talks about the next generation of smart-pens, which have self-contained 802.11 or Bluetooth interfaces, and are stand-alone Internet appliances that can be used to directly send email — scribble a note and an address and the device pipes it out to some nearby Internet connection and sends it off as email. It's a pretty cool idea, and I imagine that it will be very attractive to those technophobes who are all the time whingeing about the soullessness of writing by keyboard and the emotional satisfaction they derive from scribbling with pens. Not me! I learned to type before I learned to write cursively and I loathe paper…
