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I have reviewed a couple of such devices in the past with limited success.

The IrisNotes product consists of a 7x3x1.4cm unit that receives the notes from what looks like a fairly conventional pen. You then plug the unit into a PC or notebook via the supplied micro USB to USB cable supplied. Open the first piece of software (more of this in a bit) and the graphic images of what you have written is imported. To change this to text press the convert icon this opens the second piece of software and fairly rapidly you have editable text.

Back to the start, first get your industrial scissors as it comes in one of those welded packages that look great on hooks in a dealers premises but are a nightmare to open. Once you have extracted everything you are ready to install the software.

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First a full sized CD total space taken 53MB, then a mini DVD space taken 176MB. Do not ask me why the contents of both packages could not be on a single CD. Having a DVD (even a mini one) disqualifies anyone without a DVD drive. The time taken on a reasonably fast Vista system was only six minutes for both the software installs.

In the packaging you are supplied with three pen refills and four small watch batteries. You need to insert one refill in the front of the pen and two of the batteries on the top of the pen.

Press the unit and if it has any battery power (mine did not) then you are ready to write. Attach the USB to charge the unit and after a couple of hours you can write.

After I had written a couple of sentences I decided to press the button on the right side of the front to start another document. The number in the 3x1cm LED display still showed 0 so I assumed I had a problem. After several tries I gave up and had a think. I then found a slider on the side of the pen and once this was pushed I saw another icon on the LED and all was well. I then checked five pages in the Quick Start Guide and still could find no mention of this step.

So now I wrote a couple of paragraphs and then attached the unit to the PC opened the Mobile Note Taker Software and told it to upload the files (file in my case) from the unit. My not that brilliant handwriting was displayed on the screen. I then pressed the button to open My Script Notes Lite which should convert the graphics to editable text. It wanted a serial number after looking through everything I found it on the mini DVD (listed as a CD in the Quick Start Guide) and once entered I was able to open the application and after around 30 seconds my graphics were converted to text WITHOUT A SINGLE ERROR I was more than amazed.

I then decided to stop trying my best scrawl and make it work harder and while there was the occasional letter wrong it was still very good. Remember all this had was a short paragraph of my attempted best writing before I reverted to my more normal scrawl and it still gave very acceptable results, I was very pleased with the results.

So give it decent packaging a better manual (remember to mention the slider on the pen) and put all the software on one CD and this is a very nice and easy to use product. I cannot give it any higher praise for accuracy.

Doing my Internet searches found IRIS Notes at a best price of £80.46 including free delivery from the first link below.  

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001U0GQBQ?ie=UTF8&tag=gadge0a-21&linkCode=as2&camp=1634

http://www.irislink.com/c2-1626-225/IRISnotes-------The-Digital-Pen-that-types-what-you-write-.aspx