This cool pen helps you recall details by recording every word of your conversation.
A colleague recently introduced me to new technology that I’m finding extremely helpful with note taking. It’s called the Echo Smartpen, and it is a pen and recording device in one.
To confirm your notes, it comes with special paper that allows you to play back your recording by touching printed commands at the bottom of the sheet. You can control the speed and even the location of the playback with the touch of the pen. After you’re finished taking notes, it transfers your notes and audio to your computer and recharges your Smartpen using a standard cable connection.
A digital version of your notes and audio come to life as an interactive document called a Pencast. Pencasts allow you
to hear, see and relive notes exactly as they were captured. Then you can use Livescribe Connect to send Pencasts to people and destinations of your choice, such as email, Facebook or Evernotes, all from your paper or Livescribe Desktop.
There are some amazing apps that come with the pen — draw a piano scale or guitar and play the instruments on paper with the touch of the pen! There are other apps that transcribe your written notes into text, plus dictionary, thesaurus, foreign language, game and other apps. The pen is available with various storage capacities, ranging from 2GB to 8GB. I paid $150 for my 4GB pen at Best Buy, but Amazon has them for a better deal — their 4GB is $132 and the 8GB is $166.66 vs. the standard $199. The smaller 2GB is close to the original price of $99 at $96.87. You may want to get the special notebooks and extra cartridges, as well, though you can also print out the special paper from the Internet.
I wish this device had been available when I was a newspaper reporter — it would have been invaluable when trying to conduct interviews and get every word down perfectly, and nobody would ever have been able to accuse me of misquoting them! Students are reportedly using these to enhance their grades, since they can take fewer notes and concentrate on the lectures. I’m still having fun discovering all of the uses!
Related articles
- Livescribe’s Echo Smartpen drags the humble pen into the 21st Century (thenextweb.com)
- Livescribe (fusionfinds.wordpress.com)
- The Livescribe Smartpen: Digitising Our Note-Taking (appreaders.com)
- Livescribe Unveils Paper Tablet Application (prweb.com)
- LiveScribe Echo Smartpen (ubergizmo.com)
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