NEW YORK – This Christmas, how about getting a pen that reads what your kids write then barks it out through a loudspeaker?
OK, maybe that doesn’t sound so appealing at first, but the Fly Pen is a really smart toy.
Launched this week, the Fly Pen is the latest product from Leapfrog Enterprises Inc. Like the company’s popular Leapster and LeapPad gadgets, the pen is both toy and computer, education and entertainment.
The $99.99 Fly, designed for 8-to-13-year-olds, is a fat pen with a small camera aimed along the ballpoint tip. It looks at what you write, and it’s uncannily good at understanding it.
The pen talks to you through a small loudspeaker but, wisely, also includes earbuds, a decision that should save some parental sanity. It is powered by a single AAA battery.
Some things the pen lets you do out of the box:
* Draw a calculator on the page. Tap a formula, and the pen will tell you the result.
* Draw a series of circles. The pen will call out a state capital or state for each circle. Connect the correct state capital circles with the state circles while the pen times you.
* Draw a small piano keyboard. As you tap the keys, the pen plays the corresponding notes.
For more meaty educational options, you need to buy add-on cartridges that plug into the top of the pen. Three cartridges priced between $24.99 and $34.99 teach spelling, math or Spanish.
The pen’s limitation is that you have to use special paper, sold by Leapfrog, with a preprinted pattern of tiny dots that allows the camera to keep track of where it is on the page.
The add-on cartridges come with extra paper, but if the toy is a hit with your kids, you could run out of paper after a week or two, and extra paper is quite expensive at $9.99 for an 8.5-by-11 inch pad. (I bet someone could reverse engineer the paper and print their own on an inkjet but that hasn’t happened yet. Photocopying doesn’t work)
There is also an add-on baseball game called Flyball for $29.99. Players assemble their dream teams with collectible cards, then pick the batting and pitching styles for every player. The pen reads the cards then computes the chance that the batter you picked, for example Jorge Posada, can hit a high and close fastball from, say, Curt Schilling. It then uses a random function to see if Posada connects and reports the result, while keeping the score.
It’s a fun game, made more so by the radio-style commentary from the pen. It’s surprisingly sophisticated so it’s probably for the older kids and perhaps their parents. It certainly kept two adults amused. However, with booster packs costing $7.99 for 12 player cards, this is not cheap entertainment.
The software is solid, but not completely foolproof. At one point, I needed to reset the pen to make it accept a new cartridge. That’s right, it’s come to this: a pen that needs to be rebooted now and then.
The pen is based on technology from Anoto, a Swedish company. The technology has gone into pens before but these were marketed for business use under the assumption that people would want to store their handwritten notes in the pen then transfer them to a computer.
Those pens never took off, but the ever-decreasing price of electronics now means the same technology can go into a toy, where it seems much better suited. Character recognition has also improved from earlier Anoto pens.
The Fly Pen and its add-ons can be good learning tools but with the cost of paper and add-ons, it can get quite expensive.
You’ll also have to ask yourself: is teaching kids to work with a pen an investment in the future?
In fooling around with the pen, I noticed how poor my handwriting has become. That’s because I almost never use pens anymore – the keyboard has taken over.
Pens may be coming back, though.
Styluses are a popular interface for handheld computers. Pen-based Tablet PCs, though not a huge commercial success, demonstrate that with today’s computing power, pen-based interfaces are viable.
The Fly Pen is another sign that the pen, always reckoned to be mightier than the sword, could also have an edge on the keyboard.
Associated Press
The Fly Pen looks at what you write and talks to you through a small speaker.
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