Gadgets: Write in a journal, and store your notes digitally

Sometimes nothing beats the feeling of putting pen to paper — even if you want the results to end up in digital form.

The Moleskine smart-writing set lets you take notes and draw pictures in one of its distinctive journals as your work syncs in real time to a smartphone or tablet.

The mobile app can transcribe handwritten words into digital text in 15 languages.

PC Magazine named the Moleskine smart notebook its Editors' Choice for digital note-taking devices, praising it as "an impressive note-taking solution."

At first glance, the notebook looks just like any other Moleskine with its elastic strap enclosure.

But flip it open, and a dotted grid on the technology-embedded pages pairs the notebook with an infrared camera-enabled smart pen. The companion app lets you adjust stroke thickness or change the ink color on the fly.

The micro USB-powered pen's onboard memory can store as many as 1,000 pages if you happen to be away from your phone or tablet (like that would ever happen).

Smartphones can take very fine pictures, but what if you want to elevate your photography to the amazing level without the hassle of lugging around a bulky digital SLR camera?

Lenses from a company called Moment let you take DSLR-quality photos with either an iPhone or Android.

Mount one of its wide-angle or telephoto attachments over your phone's lens and you are ready to go. The wide lens expands your field of view beyond your phone's fixed lens to capture two times more picture while the telephoto lens offers four times the optical zoom with less image degradation.

Wirecutter said Moment has the best wide-angle and telephoto lenses, producing impressively clear images with little distortion. "For avid smartphone photographers concerned about high-quality, print-ready results, Moment lenses are worth the investment," said the Wirecutter's review.