Review

Who would have thought something as basic as the pen could be up for a geek-friendly makeover? The folk behind the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, obviously, because what they’ve come up with is a pen which can record your writing and anything you or others say, and then squirt it all into a computer for keeping and sharing.

Livescribe's Pulse Smartpen: bye-bye, biro?

Out of the box, the pen is limited to playing back recorded audio through its own loudspeaker or earphones. To get anything onto a computer you need to download free PC or Mac software.

You can then use the bundled dock to transfer pages of writing to your computer, and download apps into the pen. Yes, apps. The pen comes with 2-4GB of storage and you can fill as much of that as you like with apps, many of which are free. There are foreign phrase books, unit converters and even the odd game among the small app library at the Livescribe website.

You’ll also need to download the Livescribe Desktop software to get access to 500MB of free online storage which you can use to share notes and audio with others online.

Dock the Smartpen to transfer your text

If you want to transcribe handwritten text into editable text, you need to purchase an application called MyScript. That’ll cost you $30 (£20).

The system works but is a little unwieldy. The pen is large – about a third bigger than an average biro - and too big to drop into a pocket comfortably. It's also cumbersome to write with.

The Smartpen has a wee OLED - and even games that'll run on it

The pen scans written words using an infrared camera that sits near the nib. It’ll only record if you write onto special paper which is populated with a matrix of tiny dots. The paper is expensive - a pack of four A4 notebooks currently costs £18 at Amazon.co.uk - though there are facilities at the Livescribe website and within Livescribe Desktop for printing your own.

Each sheet of paper has a control panel along its bottom edge which you tap with the pen to issue instructions relating to voice recording such as start and stop, set bookmarks, alter playback speed, jump back and forward, mute playback, and so on.

Tap on the printed 'controls' to activate commands

There is also a set of four directional arrows you tap to get through the pen’s menu system. A small 96 x 18 OLED display on the pen shows menus and settings, and the pen speaks as you move around its menus telling you where you are and what you're changing.

When you’ve done writing, you dock the pen to a PC or Mac and anything you’ve put down on paper or spoken gets transferred across automatically.

Handwriting-to-text software costs extra

Pages are displayed as thumbnails - click one and it expands to fill the screen. Audio is named automatically by date and time, and you can listen to it separately from any text it may relate to. Written material and audio don’t seem to be explicitly linked to each other. You have to physically find the audio note that corresponds to a page and can then play it back while viewing the page.

Notebooks are transferred to Livescribe Desktop in page by page sequence, and while you can export individual pages as PDFs or images, you can’t reorder them within Livescribe Desktop itself.

Verdict

The Livescribe Pulse Smartpen is easy to learn to use, and it functions seamlessly once you have the desktop software set up. But it's expensive, and the pen is large. It's also yet another thing whose battery you need to keep charged. The 300mAH non-removable cell kept going for over a week, but remembering to charge sporadically could be a challenge.

The pen is a clever concept, but is there really any benefit to adding audio to what you could get out of a cheap scanner and document management software? ®

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