...but I have to get a Flypen for myself. Paul Boutin has a great piece on it in Slate:
Fly comes with a beginner's pack of simple, fun games like a calculator, a draw-it-yourself music keyboard and drum machine, and a goofy DJ contest where you scratch on paper. There are also Fly stickers you can slap anywhere. Tap the pen on the sticker of a guy with a wide-open mouth and the pen belches. If you're 9 years old, I'm sure it's hilarious....
The weird thing is that the games would be mind-numbingly stupid on a computer screen. Oooh, a calculator! But using pen and paper woke up a different part of my brain. The key seems to be the Seven-Second Rule: Keep the user engaged but not overwhelmed....
This last strikes me as a really interesting observation. In a lighter vein, Boutin continues:
Even though I think this is a spectacular gadget, I'm not sure the Fly will spawn a vibrant new genre the way Palm's Pilot 1000 did 10 years ago.... The Fly is fun to play with, but I can only think of one killer app for a pen-and-paper computer that meticulously records every stroke, prompts you when you don't follow instructions, and leaves you with a paper copy in your own handwriting: LeapFrog should definitely consider making voting machines....
The presumed wisdom in Silicon Valley is that you give any new tech to a samurai class of early adopters who figure out the bugs, use it to look at porn, and help you prepare it for the mass market. Instead of presuming all new technologies should begin their life as $300 status gadgets, how about turning them over to the kids? Fly's smart-paper technology has been around for years with limited success. But by February LeapFrog will have logged millions of hours of real-world testing by rugrats who'll literally draw outside the box with it.
[To the tune of Steely Dan, "FM," from the album "Citizen".]
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