Dell's Concept Stanza turns your chicken scratch into digital text

Dell has shown off a new concept device that (let's be honest) may never actually come out — but it's a lot of fun to play with. The Concept Stanza is an 11-inch tablet meant to ease the process of taking notes at work. The idea is that if you write on Stanza and then double-tap on your notes, they will be converted to digital text immediately. Connect it to a computer, and your notes will appear on the big screen.

Now, that's clearly not a revolutionary use case - devices like the Samsung Galaxy Note can convert handwritten notes into digital ones already. But the big difference with the Stanza is that it's just for writing—there are no cameras, speakers, or ports on the device, in an effort to what Dell describes as a "distraction-free experience."

Dell's tablet can recognize more than just letters. You can draw a line through the text to remove it and theoretically digitize shapes (like Venn diagrams) as well. Separately, the Stanza can serve as an external monitor to extend your screen.

I got a chance to try Shloka for just a few minutes. It was a comfortable writing experience - the stylus is compact and the tablet's screen is smooth. The device correctly interpreted all my (quite messy) writing. In English, ie - although we were told the device was going to support a whole bunch of languages, I tried typing a few things in Chinese and Korean characters it didn't recognize.

So the work is going on. Since the Stanza is still in the concept stage, there's no pricing and availability yet, and no guarantee that it'll be a real thing you can buy. But it can certainly be a great tool for boardroom and classroom use. It's the rare concept tool that I think is pretty much ready to go - although I'd expect it to know how to do multiple languages at once.