The Livescribe Pulse pen amazes everyone I’ve shown it to: Writing on special paper, it records every stroke you make on the page. It can also record the audio you hear, synchronizing the audio track with everything you write.
You can upload everything to your computer via USB, so you can view and search through your notebooks online. Or, without the computer, you can play back recorded audio simply by tapping on the page — the pen plays back whatever audio it recorded at the moment you were writing or drawing on that part of the page.
As a journalist, I love the idea of this pen. And for the most part, I like it in practice, too. I can take it to interviews, write down whatever chicken-scratch notes I want, and rest assured that the audio recording will capture every word, should I need to get a quote. Also, the search function on the desktop works amazingly well, highlighting search terms even when I’ve written them fairly illegibly, and the desktop synchronization lets me have access to my notes even when I leave the physical notebook behind.
The pen’s also ideal for students, who could use it to take better notes in class — and, as I point out in the video, it’s a lot of fun for kids.
After using it for several weeks, however, I do have a few complaints. First, it requires Mac OS X 10.5 or Windows XP or later to run. Since my work laptop is running OS X 10.4, I have to take the thing home, where I sync it with a Vista desktop.
It’s a little too fat too be comfortable. It feels like you’re writing with a cigar.
And I wish there was an easy way to integrate scanned images into the Livescribe notebooks on my computer. Several days I’ve misplaced the pen and had to take notes with a pencil. Those notes, obviously, don’t get digitized — but I could scan those pages or photograph them with a camera. If there was a way to integrate those images into the Livescribe notebooks, it would become what it truly ought to be: A comprehensive repository of all my notes.
Still, the Pulse pen is an impressive piece of technology. The fact that it’s running an extensible, Java-based platform and that more than 3,000 developers have signed on to build new Pulse pen applications suggests that it will only get more impressive as time goes on.
In this video review, I show how the Pulse pen works. If you can’t view the embedded video above, try clicking over to our video site: Wired Video: Livescribe Pulse Pen.
Livescribe Pulse Pen
$150 (1GB), livescribe.com
