Thread: New toy time!

Picked me up a Livescribe 4gig SmartPen yesterday.



Pretty nifty shit... It records everything you draw/write and replicates it in the computer when you sync it up. And it also records audio. Best part about the audio is that it syncs it up with what you are writing. So you can tap on the page and it will play back the audio you were hearing at the time you were writing that particular bit of text/drawing.

There are apps you can download to use and all kinds of nifty stuff. Still figuring out what all I can do with it yet.


For students or people that are in meetings a lot that audio/notes syncro can be invaluable. Now you don't have to write down EVERYTHING. You can just start recording and write down bullet points. Got five minutes of listening to a lecturer talking about, say, the latest cisco ios update? Instead of writing down everything he says, you just write "Cisco ISO Update" on the paper... Lecturer moves on to DDOS attacks and how the new update helps with that? Write down "DDOS Attacks" and so on. After the lecture if you want to jump directly to the DDOS part, you just tap "DDOS Attacks" on the paper with the pen and it starts playing back what you were hearing when you wrote that text.

Basically... if you write a lot of notes... this thing is invaluable.

Hmm... that looks pretty sweet! How much?

Originally Posted by HeavyG

Hmm... that looks pretty sweet! How much?

Well... thats the main problem... And it didn't really hit me how much I paid for it until myself and a buddy of mine went to a movie later that night and I told him "Make sure you lock the doors, I have a.............." And then I realized I was about to tell him I had a 200 dollar ink pen in the back seat.

The 2 gig version is 169, and the 4 gigger is 199. And you should get some notebooks and spare ink cartridges as well at the time.

The pen writes on special paper. If you use regular paper it's just an ink pen with a pretty impressive audio recorder built in. The notebooks aren't much more than regular ones though. I paid 20 dollars for 4 200 page college ruled notebooks. And it was 6 dollars for 6 ink cartridges.

You can also print out that special paper if you have a color laser printer (they say specifically color laser, but I'm betting a good inkjet will work as well.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7OOevasSak

I haven't tried much in the way of audio recording. So I can't speak on that other than to say that I've heard the mic on the pen is very good. The earbuds that come with it also have mics in BOTH ears which are supposed to be pretty good and gives the pen the ability to record 3D sound.

I think I read where the 4 gig version can record up to 200 hours of audio. It "remembers" it until you "archive" the notebook you are using. At that point it removes it from the pen and it stays on the computer you sync with. You also get 500 meg of space on their servers to upload "pencasts" to so other people can watch/listen to them. You may also export pages or entire notebooks to PDF to send to people.

They are beta testing an app store for the pen currently as well. It's very odd and takes some getting used to when you mess with such apps because the user interface is something you draw on the paper...

Well it doesn't quite do that, but as long as you are the one writing it, it does.

If you want to spend another 30 dollars, it also has the ability to OCR everything you write into a regular text document.

And it has another app demo installed that will translate what you write into other languages and speak it in that language for you over it's built in speaker. So you are in china and need to get out of jail for being falsely imprisoned for espionage? Write it down and the pen will translate your pleas of innocence into mandarin.