QuickLink Pen hand-held scanner

Hand-held scanners have an undistinguished pedigree. Mention them to many computer users and the image that comes to mind is a "handy scanner"; the inexpensive but, frankly, lousy contraptions that had a scan head about half a page wide with an encoder wheel on either side of it.

You dragged the scanner as evenly as you could across the thing you wanted to scan, the speed the wheels turned told it how fast it was moving, and when the scan was done you turned to the computer and beheld... a wiggly, uneven scan with somewhat variable brightness.

Handy-scanners have been pretty much obliterated by the rise of dirt cheap and, for the money, generally excellent flatbed units. But a flatbed scanner is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a nifty pocket-sized gadget. In the coming age of mobile technology, data acquisition peripherals like scanners have to get really small if they're to be as portable as, say, a Palm organiser.