Filofax is going digital. The icon of the yuppie era has finally come to terms with the computer age.

It is a minor cultural moment. For decades, the 'I can't possibly trust my whole life to an unreliable computer' mob gripped their Filofaxes with the desperation of a cabinet minister clinging to his job.

Now they may be joining the digital world.

The email and mobile phone generation is much less interested in the snob value of real leather organisers and gold fountain pens. You can't back up the data for a start (there are some obsessives who regularly photocopy their Filofaxes but they are rare and unpleasant animals). You can't dial directly from the address book and you can't text the notes.

For years, the computer industry has been trying to bring pen and paper up to date. Technically, handwriting recognition is very good - about 98 per cent accurate once the system has been fully trained, but this still means an error in every paragraph, forcing the writer to put the pen down, correct the mistake and pick the pen up again. So virtually no-one uses it.

Swedish company Anoto has been chipping away for years at an alternative approach, which is the basis for Digital Filofax. Paper sheets are printed with a faint background pattern of dots which are recognised by a tiny camera in the body of a compatible digital pen, which not only improves the accuracy of the image stored in the pen, but tells the computer what kind of image is being stored, such as contact details or calendar entries.

After years of painfully slow progress, a wave of Anoto-based pens has washed up on these shores in the last few months, including Logitech's io pen, Sony Ericsson's Chatpen and Nokia's Digital Pen. The stationery is drifting into the shops as well, including, inevitably, electronic Post-It notes and a digital version of the PR girl's favourite Black'n'Red notepad.

But all the systems fall into the same trap as handwriting recognition - they create more work than they save.

The Logitech pen links only with PCs, not mobile phones, and getting the words down is only the start of the process - you then have to download the stored notes, select the writing you want recognised, correct the errors, copy the results into new documents, store them in the right folders and so on.

The mobile-phone oriented Nokia pen doesn't even have recognition - your scribbles are stored as images on your mobile phone.

The Sony Ericsson pen does have a brilliant feature that may show the way forward - a texting pad, printed with lines of boxes like a paper form, which makes the recognition much more accurate. Enter your text message in the boxes, add the phone number, tick the 'send' box and the message is transferred by Bluetooth to your phone and dispatched.

The text pad is easier to use than the phone's keypad, and you have a permanent record of every message.

In many ways, the digital pen is the ideal accessory to the mobile phone. It does well what mobile phones do badly - enter data and display the results.

But what I want is a digital Filofax with Anoto diary and address book, so when you meet a new best friend at the sales conference and arrange to 'do lunch' in one of your rare 'windows', you simply write the details in your Filofax. The pen will automatically store the time, venue and your new contact's details in your phone, which will update your PC via GPRS. No editing, no copying, no general admin.

Unfortunately, none of the pens do this - but they are getting close. I got my old Filofax out yesterday and dusted off its musty leather cover. It slipped back in my pocket with the comfortable anticipatory feeling you get when you bump into an old girlfriend and discover she hasn't been going out much lately...