After a while of testing the Pulse Smartpen I think it is time to write a smart report. Let’s start with a picture and the technical specification:

Technical specification

  1. Processor: ARM 9
  2. Screen: 96×18 OLED Display
  3. Camera: High speed infrared camera (over 70 images/sec)
  4. 2GB NAND (over 200h recording time) (depends on audio quality)
  5. Battery: 300 mAh rechargeable lithium (unfortunately NON-removable)
  6. Embedded microphone: Mono recording
  7. Headset microphone: 3-D recording, binaural or stereo recording
  8. Playback: Embedded speaker or audio jack (2.5mm)
  9. USB mobile charging cradle
  10. Size: 15.5cm length, 1.5cm width
  11. Weight: 36g

More details can be viewed on the Livescribe website at: http://www.livescribe.com/smartpen/techspecs.html

The first steps

The Smartpen comes with a software “Livescribe Desktop” for Microsoft Windows and Apple’s Mac OS. I installed both, the Windows version within a VMWare image and the Mac OS version native.

After the setup i plugged in the pen and the first thing happened a messages pop up telling me there is a newer software version for the Smartpen. Very cool! I clicked update and it… well the update failed on Mac OS! There is no progress bar and no indicator if the update is still running. After 1h I stopped it and tried to restart the procedure. This failed on Mac OS and the stick didn’t work with voice recording. I booted up the Windows again and tried the flash update from there and i worked fine! For me it seems that the Mac OS version of Livescribe Desktop is still in development and not yet final. :-(

Finally the update was successful and I progressed with the first example sheet from Livescribe. This sheet is a little how-to guide showing the functionality of the pen. This is very straight forward. Nicely done!

After that I started writing my first own sheet and tried the MyScript for Livescribe. This is a OCR for handwriting and it is extreme exact! I was surprised by the results of the OCR. It internally works with a dictionary and matches all words with it. Therefore it is necessary to install the dictionary of the language you are writing in. You can add any language at any time after the installation.

I am very happy with this investigation. I will try to give a short summery in pros and contras:

Pros

  • Based on Java technology ;-)
  • Intelligent system
  • Links voice to the written text
  • Voice replay by clicking on the text
  • Easily transfers notes to PC/Mac
  • Note management, use of different notebooks (1-8)
  • Notebooks can be printed with postscript ready laser printer
  • Battery time is great

Contra

  • Notebooks are expensive
  • Mac software seems to be a beta release
  • Flash Update fails on Mac
  • A native Mac software would be great

Hints

If you do not have a PostScript ready printer you can download the notebooks 1-4 as PDF files. Have a look at the Livescribe forum. There is an topic with download links for the PDF and PS files.