Moleskine Smart Planner turns your scribbles into Google and iCal calendar events

We may be filing away more notes online than ever before, but there's still an appeal to the tangibility of seeing your own written words on a paper page. It's something that premium stationary company Moleskine know, and believes its found the middle ground between connected convenience and old-school paper charm.

It's launching its new Smart Planner notebooks this month which work in tandem with its Pen+ scribbler to turn your handwritten notes intelligently into online calendar entries.

In the Smart Planner book, entries written into the left-hand 7-day-week formatted page will be instantly synced through the Pen+ to a range of online calendar services, including Google Calendar, Apple's iCal and Microsoft's Outlook. The right hand page, for more general notes, then syncs with the Moleskine Notes app.

Smart page ecosystem

The notebooks use "patented Ncode" technology in order to digitise your notes. The Pen+ can spot marks on a grid on each page that is otherwise invisible to see and, with the pen connected to your mobile device, transmit the scribbles to the relevant online source.

The pen can also store 1,000 pages in its own internal memory, meaning you can still keep writing even if you're away from a web connection, knowing that it'll start the sync process again once it's back in a Wi-Fi zone.

However, the Pen+ can't currently be bought separately from the Smart Writing Set bundle (already in stores), which makes it a bit of a pricey option for newcomers. While the Smart Planner is only set to cost $29.90 / £25.99 (around AU$40) when it goes on sale on September 12th, you can only get the Pen+ with the $199 / £199 (roughly AU$325) Smart Writing Set, which also includes the larger Paper Tablet notebook and an ink refill. It's a neat idea, but it's quite the investment.