Genius Tablet Gear Taps Notes and Design

A new digital table and mouse-pen from Genius aim to simplify the note-taking process, and help designers put the perfect stroke on their work.

Peripheral and accessory maker Genius wants to help computer users take their life in their own hands—and their own handwriting—with their new tablet products, the G-Note 7100 digital tablet and the MousePen 8×6 tablet.

The G-Note 7100 is a handwriting recognition tablet which, unlike most competing products, doesn’t require any special paper. Users can slide any old A4 or letter pad onto the tablet and begin writing freehand notes in either portrait or landscape orientation, and the tablet digitizes the input, processes the handwriting, and lets users offload the stored text to their PC later on. The G-Note 7100 sports 32 MB of built-in Flash memory which can store up to 100 pages of notes and sports a 2,000 LPI scanning resolution so it has a decent chance of interpreting your haphazard, chicken-scratch handwriting. The G-Note 7100 runs on four AAA batteries and comes with two pens (one red, one black), three backup pen tips, a leather portfolio, and USB cable. The tablet wants Windows 2000 or higher (and is Vista-compatible), and is priced at $159.

Although not as unique as the G-Note 7100, Genius also rolled out its MousePen 8×6, a graphic tablet aimed at both home users and professional designers who want to draw, sketch, edit images, or just attach their haphazard, chicken-scratch handwriting to instant messages as graphics . In addition to an 8 × 6 working area with a “hot cell” for customizable functions, the MousePen 8×6 comes with a cordless pen and a cordless three-button mouse with 3D scroll wheel; the pen has 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity for creating different types of strokes (like posing as a fountain pen, airbrush, or watercolor brush in a graphics program). The MousePen 8×6 is bundled with a trial version of Corel Painter 8, and it priced at $99; Genius says it’ll work with Windows 98 or later.