Genius G-Note 5000

Some days ago I saw this nice gadget on the website of a distributor. I thought it might be a good idea: A notepad you take with you, you write as many pages as you want and, when you are back home you can download all your handwritten text or drawings.

Of course you can do this with a cheap scanner without having to recourse to buying any new hardware (provided you already own an scanner). However, what I was looking for when I learned about this product was a tablet for drawing.

The Genius G-Note series does both: You can use it off-line to write more than 100 pages in the built-in 32MB of flash memory and it can also be used online as a mouse substitute (or companion). I feel much more comfortable when writing and drawing with a pen than with a mouse.

The unit came with some Windows software which was ok. Without any software the tablet looks like a USB flash drive to your system where each page drawn shows as a different file. Filenames are numbered (i.e. BK-01-001.DNT, BK-01-002.DNT and so on). File format was unknown but a quick look at it suggested a sequence of waypoints representing what you drew was used. Included software allowed you to export either to PDF or JPEG file formats.

Four AAA batteries power the tablet and two button batteries power the black and red ballpens included with the unit. The color of the pen is kept on the archives, so the system output will look exactly the same what you wrote on the page. I am not yet sure how long batteries last, but manufacturer claims you can get 80 hours out of a battery set. The tablet unit also has several buttons to allow you create a new empty page, to delete a given page and to select the current page you want to be writing on.

Before trying to reverse-engineer the .DNT file format I thought it would be a good idea try to pull the information from the manufacturer. Of course I did google for that first, but my quest drew zero results. So I checked the "About ..." option on the software that came with the unit to learn that UC-Logic was the maker of the program. I looked for their support email address on the net and I sent them a message asking for the info. To my surprise, my message was answered promptly and I was provided with a two-pages long word file with all the details on the file format they use. It took me two hours of test to get a perl program that successfully converts a .DNT file to a .SVG file I can later manipulate with Inkscape. I keep each stroke as a different polyline.

Here you have the perl code. And, I almost forgot, the G-Note 5000 retails at $99, so I think it is a very good deal.