The Mintpad is a curious little device. A tiny little screen that you carry around, it takes the age-old practice of passing notes into the digital realm. How is that different from texting or IMs? Simple — the Mintpad's a tablet, letting you write directly on the screen with a stylus instead of using a keyboard. It doesn't recognize handwriting, but it will send the original note, in full color and complete with bad penmanship, to your recipients via Wi-Fi.

The catch? You can send the notes only to other Mintpad owners. Still, it's a fun feature on an otherwise everyday portable media player/Web browser/camera with 4GB of memory. Although the $156 Mintpad is only available in Korea, we wouldn't mind seeing its abilities put into some kind of iPhone app.

Mintpass Mintpad, via Engadget