Livescribe Pulse Smartpen – the iPhone of writing

This is a gadget that turns everybody who hears about it into a teenager. They’ll either respond with an over-excited “wow, amazing!” or a sullen “borrrrrrrrrring”. Me? I wish I’d had one years ago.

The Smartpen has actually been around for a little while, but when I came across it I thought it sounded too good to be true. I was wrong. It’s not perfect, but no owner seems willing to give it up.

In simple terms it’s a pen which records notes as you write. So, at the end of a lecture, presentation or interview you can hook it up to your computer and it’ll store both your written notes and a synchronised audio recording. Actually, you don’t even need a computer.

Put the pen on any point in your notes and it will replay the audio recording matching that moment. It means you know exactly what the speaker said without trying to make sense of your handwriting.

Every journalist I’ve spoken to wants one. Transcribing interviews is a job we all detest. But trying to take complete notes as you listen to what your subject is saying while simultaneously framing the next question is beyond the multitasking abilities of most reporters. It’s certainly more than I can do.

I hate to think how many hours I’ve spent going backwards and forwards through recordings to try and find the precise words my subject used. Then it usually transpires that the turn of phrase wasn’t quite as good as I remembered it. The Smartpen should be the perfect solution.

What has put me off buying one was the expectation that it wouldn’t perform quite as well in practice as it did in theory. In fact, the technology seems to perform pretty much perfectly.

It works using a tiny camera focused on the point where the pen touches a special type of paper covered in a complex, almost invisible, matrix of minute dots. It can therefore track its movements exactly and store them with the recording from its built-in or external microphone.

Livescribe seems to have conquered the problems you might expect would come from cramming so much tech into such a small package. Actually just managing to fit a camera, battery, memory, display, microphone, speaker, micro-USB socket and a refill into something not much bigger than an ordinary Biro is an achievement in itself.

But, for instance, for the microphone to be sensitive enough to operate effectively in a lecture theatre or with a group of people is amazing. The pen has attracted very few complaints and it’s almost impossible for a consumer electronics company to hide problems from Google.

Minor niggles are inevitable. Users have to buy special paper which isn’t cheap, but neither is it outrageously expensive and it comes in a variety of styles of notebook. Also the ink refills don’t last as long as some ‘normal’ pens which have rather more space for ink. I might have expected complaints about the Smartpen being bulky or unbalanced, but actually it’s quite comfortable.

The Livescribe Pulse Smartpen costs from around £120. The special notebooks cost upwards of around £10 for four depending on style. There’s more information from the main UK distributors although it is worth shopping around before buying. But for a really detailed examination check out the US website.

This includes what must be the only app store for a pen.

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