...the Livescribe Smartpen, which comes with a Java-based development kit. The pen is cool: it's a pen with ink, but it also has a tiny camera in the pen-tip that is watching what you write, 72 times a second. It records all of your writing strokes, and also has a microphone built into it so it can record what you hear, too. It's great for taking notes, in ways that is much easier to understand when you try it yourself. But I'll try to explain just part of it here.

So, suppose you're in class or a meeting, and you're taking notes as people are talking. The Pen comes with a notebook of paper with little pictures at the bottom; those pictures act as buttons to do things like start/stop recording, change volume, or select something from the pen's menu of applications. So you start recording by tapping the pen-tip on the "Start" picture at the bottom of your notebook. You just start writing your notes as people are talking, and when you're done you tap on "Stop". When you reply the audio (the pen has a little speaker in it and also a stereo headphone jack), the pen begins playing back the audio from the beginning. So far, so good.

But get this: if you tap the pen-tip on any of your notes, the pen starts playing the audio from where it was when you wrote that note! It keeps track of when you wrote each pen-stroke, so if you want to playback a particular section of audio, just write something, anything, on the paper, and during playback just tap on whatever you wrote. It's like an audio bookmark. Very cool.

The notebook paper is just paper, but it's imprinted with a tiny, almost indiscernable pattern that helps the pen figure out where on the paper it's drawing. That lets you do things like one of their sample applications, which is to make a piano out of the paper. You start the piano app and the pen asks you to draw some vertical lines on the page, then two horizontal lines to make the vertical lines into a keyboard, then two letters beneath the keyboard you drew (one to let you select an instrument, the other to let you select a rhythm pattern). Then to play the piano you just drew, you simply tap on the "keys". It's just plain fun!

And it's a Java device (Java ME), so you can write your own Java apps for the pen. Livescribe had a contest at the show this week for whoever wrote the best pen app.

It's a damned cool device, and at the show they were charging $139 for it. I don't even like writing, and I want it!

I'm not doing the thing justice; you gotta go to the website and check out the videos and demos. Really, though, you should just check it out in person. I haven't even mentioned the stereo headphone-microphones, just another of many cool features of the pen.