Livescribe Echo smartpen

Product Livescribe Echo smartpen
Website www.livescribe.com
Specifications 8GB memory (4GB available in US). ARM A9 processor, Intel-based Mac with Mac OS X 10.5.5, or PC running Windows XP with SP3, Vista or Windows 7
Price £179, four-pack of notebooks £16.50, five ballpoint refills £5.49

ONE NOTE is not the best known product in Microsoft's Office suite but it has one gem of a feature. It will record a talk or conversation as you take notes, synchronising the sound so that you can listen again to a particular passage by clicking the relevant text, whether written by keyboard or by hand on a touch screen. Essentially your notes become an index to the recorded sound.

You'd think that this would make One Note a must-have for students, lawyers, writers and anyone else who has to take notes. But it is let down by ergonomics - laptop microphones are not well configured for the task, touchscreens have yet to get a comfortable writing surface, and typing can be too noisy for meetings. In short, One Note awaits the right hardware.

Enter Livescribe, with its listening smartpens. These do not use One Note but they do offer the same basic trick, packaged in a pen that digitally captures anything that it writes.

The Echo is the latest in Livescribe's range, which uses specially patterned paper developed by the Swedish company Anoto to allow a smartpen to position itself on a page. The pattern is so faint that the page looks white at first glance.

You can create your own Anoto stationery if you have a colour laser capable of printing at 600dpi.

The pen is slightly too large for comfort but it can be used as an ordinary ballpoint. A removable cap protects not only the nib but also a tiny infra-red camera that reads the page. The cap does not fit at the other end of the pen, so it is likely to get lost, but you are given a spare.

The lower portion of the pen is rubberised for easy gripping. Above this is a tiny microphone and speaker, pointing outwards when held in the writing position, plus a small one-line OLED mono display and an on-off switch.

At the blunt end is a micro-USB connector used for charging and linking to a computer, plus a jack that can take either headphones or a stereo combination earbud headphones and microphone that Livescribe offers as a £27.30 option. We did not have a chance to try one but it is said to improve recording in lecture halls and meetings, a tacit admission that you cannot expect too much of the built-in mic in the pen. In our tests, the recording quality of the built-in mic was very good when we tried it in face-to-face interviews, certainly good enough for transcription purposes. But as the Echo stands or falls on its ability to record recognisable speech in larger rooms, which is not always easy without a suitable mic even when the original sound is perfectly audible, the earbud should probably be regarded as a necessity.

The standard smartpen function of capturing writing from paper is useful in itself, of course. An obvious application is in form filling, to which the recording can add an extra dimension by capturing spoken comments in tasks such as market surveys. Clearly there are privacy issues here and the thing should not be used surreptitiously.

Livescribe offers a software development kit for creating these specialist applications but the utility that comes with the pen will suffice for most people. This automatically extracts data from the pen and presents you with images of your work pages. For €29.95 you can buy a special Livescribe version of Myscript handwriting recognition software, which makes a fair stab at translating your writing into text.

The pen-paper interface has interactivity, with each page having a set of symbols that can be used to navigate the Echo's menus and optional applications, which include talking phrase books and dictionaries. These work as well as you could expect in a device of this format but the real potential of smartpen apps surely lies in using them with other mobile devices such as smartphones and slates to augment their relatively poor input facilities.

Already there's an app that brings Echo notes and audio to the Iphone. Still more interesting are apps due to to launch this autumn. Connect will enable you to email a PDF of notes directly from your smartpen. Pencast PDF will package both the audio and notes as a PDF usable with Acrobat Reader version 9.3 or above. Most exciting is Paper Tablet, which will allow the pen to control a screen, effectively turning the system into a high-res graphics tablet.

Even the Echo's flaws are interesting because you can see how it could get better, a sign of a potentially seminal product. Ideally it would be much thinner and it lacks wireless to exploit fully the synergy with other mobile devices. Wireless would allow you to control them, and send notes or message through them, without taking them out of your pocket or bag.

Clearly there are technological constraints on what can be done but there seems to be no reason why smartpens can't get a lot more useful, and even become a standard input device. It's too early to say if that will happen, but it would be good to see developers try for it. They might at least get people back to writing on paper until screen textures begin to match what is still by far the world's best writing surface.

In Short
The Echo shows that smartpens are becoming seriously useful. If prices drop they could go mainstream. µ

The Good
Does what it says on the box with minimal hassle.

The Bad
No wireless.

The Ugly
Shape is dictated by engineering, while people are accustomed to pen designs refined by centuries of use.

Bartender's Score
7/10