Livescribe Pulse Smartpen review

David Bayon Read more November 2, 2009

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£130

Price when reviewed

We may sit in meetings tapping away at our netbooks these days, but for many people a keyboard just can’t match the speed and flexibility of pen and paper for note taking. Livescribe’s Pulse Smartpen is a novel solution, merging pen and Dictaphone with glorious efficiency.

With a standard ink nib monitored by the high-speed infrared camera just behind it, every pen stroke you make is saved to the 2GB internal memory and mapped to its location on the unique dotted paper. Then connect the pen to your PC via the USB dock and eerily accurate digital versions of your notes are downloaded to the Livescribe desktop client. This alone would be a useful tool, but paired with audio recording it becomes something else entirely.

Just tap the record symbol at the foot of each page and the microphone gets to work, picking up sounds with remarkable clarity. With headphones connected it’s easy to tell where the speaker is in the room, and the beauty is that every word you jot down is linked with the audio being recorded at that precise moment. Simply tap the nib on any word and the linked audio will play back from that point.

It’s all wonderfully simple, particularly thanks to the tutorial. The first two pages of the provided journal contain tasks for you to carry out, such as writing while speaking, so you quickly grasp how powerful the Smartpen can be. You’re not limited to recording either, with other controls to add bookmarks and skip around during playback.

You don’t even need to use the desktop client for most tasks, but back at your PC you can do even more with your notes. Once your pages are uploaded, clicking on your words with the mouse triggers the same linked playback, but with your writing highlighted in time with the audio. It’s like a personal karaoke screen, and lets you see precisely what you were writing as different topics were discussed.

For meetings it’s a breath of fresh air, allowing you to focus on the speaker knowing you needn’t scrawl down every last point of information. For students its potential is even greater. You’ll need to sit near the front of the lecture hall for the microphone to do its job, but the prospect of having every one of your lectures recorded in full on your laptop, with accompanying digitised handwritten notes, is just mind-boggling.

It’s surprising to see Livescribe so open to helping you save money too. Ink refills will set you back £5 for a set and extra journals cost £10 each, but if that sounds a lot for a pad of paper, you can just print your own. A range of lined and unlined papers in various styles can be printed to match your project’s needs, and all you need is a PostScript-compatible 600dpi colour laser. You’ll miss out on the organisation of separate journals for each subject, but for one-off meetings that won’t matter.

Admittedly, at £130 inc VAT it’s going to be too expensive for most people to even consider, but for hard-up students its organisation and efficiency shouldn’t be underestimated. And if you regularly find yourself falling behind in presentations as you desperately try to jot down the details, the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen is a life-saver.