The C-Pen is a handheld gadget that scans and recognizes printed text. Drag it across a sentence and it will convert it to digital letters and store it in its gigantic memory for later retrieval with a PC or PalmPilot. Drag it across a word and it'll retrieve its definition from a built-in Merriam-Webster's dictionary. The user interface is gorgeous, very intuitive with a large LCD screen, two buttons and a jog dial, and it's only about as big as a fat marker. Its OCR accuracy is impressive. It can recognize multiple languages, and you can load in dictionaries for other languages. It can also scan and store addresses into an address book, which you can beam to your PalmPilot via infrared, along with your other scans and notes. You can even upload extra applications, including a barcode scanner and a Tetris game. There are even an open SDK and the inevitable third-party apps.

As if that wasn't impressive enough, you can even do text entry into the device by drawing over a patterned surface, using a Graffiti-esque lettering system. Not quite as fast or as easy as PalmPilot's lettering, but it's an ingenious way to edit scanned notes without a cumbersome keypad. It doesn't quite recognize handwritten notes, it's only good at book/magazine text, but it doesn't do your homework, wash your dog, or pick winning lotto numbers, either, and neither does your iPaq, your GPS, your iPod, or whatever else you think is cool.

It seems like I heard about this device a long time ago, and it went by the wayside with the other must-have gadgets. It's no longer available new from Amazon, though third-party sellers have them listed on the site for $130. I suppose their utility is limited to researchers and maybe students, so I wouldn't expect them to be top sellers, but I'm so impressed that it can even do these things that it seems kind of sad that it isn't more useful. Maybe I'm just extra impressed because I got mine barely used for $20. But look at that thing go!

Oh, and it's easy to use with Linux.