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08.22.07
The Quest For A Bluetooth Pen Device
 By Dave Taylor
I am a law student and have completely switched over to a laptop for all of my notes. My laptop is bluetooth and I use a bluetooth mouse. My question is do you know of any bluetooth pen devices? Sometimes it would be helpful to draw things by hand, and the regular mouse doesn't cut it. I want a pen-like device that can act as mouse. Hopefully it would be small, portable, and bluetooth.
My first response is "Google it, brother!", so let's see if that'd be a useful tactic. I'm going to go ahead and search on Google for buy bluetooth pen input device.
432,000 matches (plus or minus at least 10%, based on what I know about how Google calculates those numbers). However accurate, you're not the first person to be curious about that type of thing. While the first match is a shopping comparison engine (which could be a good place to do some research), the second is more interesting: Bluetomorrow.com appears to have just what you're seeking.
The rest of the matches are bizrate.com and nextag.com, both of which are shopping comparison engines. It's annoying that they're polluting the results as much as they are but I think when we add that magic word buy we get right into the crosshairs of their SEO efforts. Nonetheless, we can glean some useful information from their results, notably that peripheral powerhouse Wacom appears to have a matching device described in the Nextag.com match as "Wacom GRAPHIRE BLUETOOTH 6X8 PEN TABLET WITH MOUSE". So let's go to the Wacom site directly and see what we can find...
Their site's a bit confusing, but some digging reveals that they have a very slick device that they sell called the Graphire 6x8 bluetooth. It looks like this:
At $250, however, that's quite possibly vast overkill for what you seek.
Next stop, Amazon.com, where I'll again search for "bluetooth pen" and see what comes up... There are a couple of matches, one of which is a Logitech commercial bluetooth pen (at least, I assume it's a commercial pen: five of them are priced at over $1000, putting them in the same ballpark as the Wacom solution). Kind of a dead end.
I think I'll go back to Google, but this time try the little-known Google Product Search. I do a search with the keywords bluetooth pen and it shows me pretty decent results, actually. The Wacom we've already seen, this time featured at only $209, along with the Logitech IO commercial pen. Unfortunately, those seem to be the only two matches.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is internationally known as an expert on both business and technology issues. Holder of an MSEd and MBA, author of twenty books and founder of four startups, he also runs a strategic marketing company and consults with firms seeking the best approach to working with weblogs and social networks. Dave is an award-winning speaker and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs.
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