COMPUTER - PERIPHERALS - 24.06.2011

Digital pens

Smartpen

Livescribe (http://www.livescribe.com/uk) has been producing digital pens for five years now. A popular product is the Pulse Smartpen: when you use it to write something down, the background sound is recorded at the same time. When clicking somewhere in your notes later, the pen will replay what was said at that exact moment. The audio quality is excellent. This means that if your notes are unclear, you can always check exactly what the speaker meant. The pen uses ordinary ink, but you should write or draw on special Livescribe paper. This paper contains tiny dots which establish the link between the “location” of your notes and the exact time the sound is recorded.

Pulse versus Echo. A while ago, the successor to the Pulse Smartpen was launched: the Echo Smartpen. It has larger maximum memory (8GB instead of 4GB) and can be recharged by means of a USB cable, whereas the Pulse Smartpen has to be inserted into a cradle to be recharged. However, the Echo Smartpen costs up to £180 (depending on the storage capacity), and every extra pad of 400 sheets of special paper costs £18.50.

Transfer to PC

All the notes you make with the Pulse or Echo SmartPen can be transferred to your computer via USB - in the future, this will become possible wirelessly too. This transfer requires the supplied Livescribe Desktop software. The accompanying audio is played automatically when you click on a note. In the search field, you can enter a term to be looked up in your handwritten notes. This search function worked very well in our test.

Link with Google Docs and Evernote

A new application was launched recently: Livescribe Connect (http://livescribe.com/install). This allows you to easily post your digital notes and the associated audio recordings on the Internet. This is done via Facebook or Evernote (http://www.evernote.com - the free Web service which allows you to save Web clippings and other notes online and share them with others). To enable this to work, draw a line on your special paper and above it write “Facebook” or “Evernote”. This command tells the program that your note should be sent to the desired online service automatically as soon as you connect the pen to your computer via USB. To see how this works, check out the instruction videos at http://www.livescribe.com/nl/howto/index.html.

Note. Livescribe Connect is free, but if you also wish to post your notes on Google Docs or e-mail them as a PDF file, you should use Livescribe Connect Premium. This program comes free with a 4 or 8GB Echo Smartpen, but for the other models you should buy an “upgrade pack” (£9.15).

Other digital pens?

There are other digital pens available, such as the C-Pen (http://www.cpen.com) and the IRISPen (http://www.irislink.com). However, these are not writing pens, but pens which can scan bits of text on paper - for instance from a magazine - digitise them via OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and translate them if required. So the Livescribe pens are clearly something unique, especially thanks to the new link with Facebook and Evernote.