Company: Livescribe
Product : Pulse Smartpen 2 Gig
Price: $149 (1 GB) $199 (2 GB)

Convenience Rating: 5 stars
Audio Quality: 4.9 stars
Feature set: 4.3 stars
Livescribe Desktop: 4.4 stars
Re-use/Replay Value: 4.8 stars

Overall Experience: 4.7 stars!

For the last month or so, I have been testing out the Pulse Smartpen which is an ink pen that records audio (via a microphone) while linking it to what you’re writing, so you can easily find parts of the audio by just tapping on your notes.

Here is an example: You’re sitting in a classroom but instead of frantically trying to scribble down notes or things the teacher says are going to be on a test,  you can use the Pulse Smartpen to actually listen to what’s going on and easily find key audio snippets later. Everything you write in the special dot-paper notebooks is a bookmark or reference point.  When you click on any part of your notes, the Pulse will play back the audio exactly when you wrote down the part you tapped.

The Pulse has dual noise-canceling microphones, a speaker, a OLED display, and an audio jack. The pen knows where you are writing at on the paper because the paper in the dot-paper notebooks are covered with tiny blue dots in complicated patterns which act like latitude and longitude for the pen. The Pulse Pen comes with a starter notebook and each additional notebook start at $7.95 each, and Livescribe (the company who makes the Pulse Pen) says that you can even print out your own dot paper if your printer supports 600 dpi resolution, but we couldn’t figure out how to do that on the Mac Livescribe Desktop software (we’ll talk about this further on).

The dot paper has a row of “buttons” printed along the bottom that you tap with the pen tip to start and stop recording, play back audio, etc. The Pulse also comes with some applications like a toy piano, a calculator, and a translator demo.

To use the main app, called Paper Replay, you tap the  record button and jot your notes. The Pulse automatically links your writing to the recording. Once your done taking your notes, click the “Stop” button. Then  you can tap the pen on your notes (right in the notebook!) during playback, and the audio skips to that location instantly. Dock the pen in the USB charging cradle to upload your time-stamped audio and notes to the Livescribe Desktop software, where you can search the text, play your recordings and export them, click your notes to jump around in the recording, and even watch your notes and doodles being dynamically redrawn on your Mac as the audio plays.

One thing I love is that you can record a lecture without taking notes, then jot notes later as you’re playing back the audio, and the notes will still link up to the audio.

Livescribe even has an online service which lets you upload 250MB of note recordings to keep private, share, or even post on Facebook.

Overall, the Pulse Smartpen produced amazing notes, and the audio quality was superb.  Sure it is a little expensive ($150-$199), but that is nothing to the amazing notes you’ll produce with it, and the amazing features it has built in.

Pros: Pen works really really well.  The audio quality is amazing, and it picks up sound really well.  Syncing the pen is super easy, and the notebooks are pretty nice, and come with a lot of extra control panel sheets, etc.

Cons: Some of the bells & whistles feel incomplete.  For instance, the translator on the pen can only translate 27 words, and the piano doesn’t have any black keys.  Also the Mac desktop software has a less features than the PC client, but Livescribe will be updating both the pen and the software via software updates in the near future.