I am a great believer in Livescribe's smartpens. The first offering three years ago Livescribe 2 GB Pulse Smartpen has worked perfectly ever since. It is not exactly svelte, but it had the capacity to record 200 hours of audio and has proved to be an extremely reliable and useful tool for a busy litigation practice.The Echo is a refinement of the original Pulse. It is slimmer, and doesn't quite look like one of those metal cigar containers. It has twice the memory of my original smartpen. The price has come down over the years significantly making an investment in a smartpen even more attractive.
I use my pen to record initial client interviews as well as depositions. I am able using the Livescribe Desktop software to export a recording to a CD and send it to a client to hear. However the best feature is its "point and play" technology which allows me to listen selectively to a recording on my pen by touching a word in my notes. The audio immediately syncs to the part of the conversation and has a five second "skip back/skip forward" feature to account for slow writers like me. I can also listen later to my notes and add additional points of interest.
Audio fidelity is amazingly good. The pen has settings for different environments like lectures or office meetings. Even if you just use the default settings you will be pleased with the output.
Besides being thinner, the new Echo no longer requires a cradle, and attaches directly to a USB port on your Mac (that's me) or PC.This eliminates one more gadget I need to lug around in my briefcase.
Livescribe's special paper should not intimidate any prospective purchaser. First it is possible to print your own paper. Livescribe suggests that this requires a laser printer, but I have actually done it with an injet. You have to test in any event whether your printer is compatible which is how I learned some inkjet printers will work.
However users will find Livescribe notebooks to be very reasonably priced. I buy Livescribe ANA-00018 Single Lined 100 Page 5-8 Notebook 4 Pack which makes the cost per notebook very comparable to ordinary spiral notebooks. Clearly Livescribe is refusing to adopt the model of printer manufacturers who make most of their money on supplies.
There are applications available for the Echo including a text recognition app that offers a 30 day free trial. However my handwriting is usually indecipherable even to me so I have never tried it. However the idea is great.
In the universe of Livescribe pens this is probably the one which should command your most serious consideration. 4GB is an an enormous amount of data and recording. I have never come close to filling 2GBs although I do remove recording from the pen from time to time while maintaining the audio on my Livescribe Desktop.
Livescribe has perfected a product that, as a tool for lawyers, for students, for physicians, and salesmen, as well a host of others was nearly perfect.
1. Write like a regular pen.
2. Record voice or sound like any digital recorder.
3. Link the written notes to the recorded sound. So if tap on a written word it will play the sound recorded at the time that word was written.
4. Upload handwritten notes and voice to computer.
5. Share your written notes and audio (Pencasts).
The sound quality is fairly good. There are lot of add on apps available like games, language translation, piano etc. which I have not used so far except MyScript, which does not work very well. It comes with two fine black ink cartridges, no medium, and I wish there was one included. The writing was faint with fine tip and it was scratchy to write. So I had to order an extra pack of five Livescribe ARA-000007 4 Medium Blue and 1 Fine Red Ink Cartridge cartridges. Sometimes the writing is faint on the computer even with medium tipped blue cartridges.
PROBLEMS
1. BUGGY MAC LIVESCRIBE DESKTOP SOFTWARE: Echo pen does not come with any software, you have to download that from the web site. LiveScribe Desktop for Mac software is very sluggish and glitchy. You will be watching the spinning wheel for a while (3:48 minutes) when it starts, it will keep on asking you for email address and password and not let you use the program until you do. And if you are not connected to the Internet, the LiveScribe won't stop spinning until you connect the Echo pen. Windows software is actually better, faster and does not hang up like that. After you connect the pen, it takes a while for the notes to show up. Although you can archive the notes from one pen to one computer, there is no way to transfer notes to multiple computers because archiving the notes removes them from the pen. The first time I connected the pen, it updated the firmware automatically.
2. DIFFICULT TO PRINT CUSTOM PAPER: Another problem is that you have to buy notebooks and paper from LiveScribe. As far as I can make out, they do not sell A4 size paper. You can print the paper on some Postscript color laser printers. I could not print the paper on Dell 5100cn color laser printer, either with Dell Postscript driver or with Adobe generic Postscript driver but I was successful in printing the paper on Brother MFC-9840CDW Color Laser Multifunction Center with Wireless Interface and Duplex but only from the Mac LiveScribe. It took a long time 2 hours to print 25 pages! Interestingly, the custom notebooks could be printed only in Mac Livescribe, not from the Windows version. The file was 200MB. You have to print one full notebook of 25 pages at time and you cannot print partial notebooks, say pages 1-10. And you can only print total 100 pages (4 Notebooks with 25 pages each). So if you want to use more than hundred pages, you have to archive a notebook before you can do that. That limits active pages to 100 at a time! This is the biggest drawback I found for my purpose because I need to have hundreds of active records at a time where I can write information on multiple days. The same limitation also applies to their notebooks. Despite using 1200 dpi resolution for printing, the quality of writing was still poor when it showed up on the computer. So I ended up using Livescribe Single Subject Spiral Notebook ANA-00017, 4-Pack, Nos. 1-4 which have A4 size paper, but punched.
3. NO EASY WAY TO BACKUP: The data transferred to the computer is saved in one of those obscure and hidden Windows & Mac folders that are hard to find for non techies and will not back up unless you do global backup like Windows Backup or Mac Time Machine. You cannot save your data in custom folders. Even though, I had everything backed up, I could not restore the the data when my hard drive died and lost all archived notes. Three technical support reps from LiveScribe could not restore it. First two said they will call back and let me know but never did. The last technical support rep did get back to me in Email and said they could not restore my backed up data. After losing lot of data (300 A4 pages), I now save all notes as PDF files in my custom data folders and also upload to Evernote. I do not record lot of audio and so far the free Evernote account has been sufficient. Integration of Windows LiveScribe with Evernote works well.
4. POOR HANDWRITING RECOGNITION ADD ON MyScript: My main purpose in buying this pen was to convert handwritten notes to computer text. For that I had to buy a thirty buck add on called MyScript for LiveScribe which does not work so well. Even with clear cursive writing it does not recognize many words and has particular difficulty with technical words, so you have to add each word one by one into the dictionary, and cannot import your Microsoft Word or Pages dictionary. Very tedious process. But it has Auto Replacement, which works like Microsoft Word Autocorrect, e.g. if you write 3m, you can program it to expand to 3 months. That is the work around to poor handwriting recognition.
5. ANNOYING UNTETHERED CAP: Like every one else, I found the loose cap very irritating, it can be easily lost. Are you supposed to keep putting and removing the cap all day long? It is not clear to me why they couldn't make a retractable pen or why the cap cannot be held in place on the back of the pen or tethered with a small cord. There is no clip on the pen to clip it to your pocket either. You will find this very annoying.
6. NO AUTO ON & OFF: If you forget to turn the pen on by pressing the on/off button, the pen will not record anything. I cannot understand why the pen does not have auto on, it should turn on as soon as you start writing on the paper. The on off button should be behind the ink cartridge, so it turns on just by the process of starting to write. Or may be they can fix this with a firmware upgrade.
Overall, it is great for students to record lectures, attorneys, journalists, conference attendees making notes etc. and you can later on refer to the written notes and /or speech. You can write or record speech or do both and link the two. Those who are going to record a lot of audio should go for 8 Gb; for most users 4 Gb should suffice. If you use LiveScribe notebooks and Windows software it works fairly well. But if you have a Mac, need to print your own custom A4 paper, or need handwriting recognition, then it is a work in progress and needs lot of bugs ironed out before it can become a mainstream product. May be they can have a wi-fi card like Eye-Fi so that notes are automatically transferred to your computer. It sure has the potentiel.
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All in all, it's OK when it works. But the website, on which customer support hinges, is terrible and so maddening to use that it colors my perception of the product. It started when I bought the thing and had some questions. The website is pretty and full of information, but it is a landfill that nobody from Livescribe has ever used pretending to be a customer, I'm sure of that. Try to answer the simplest question. I can just picture a company of three geeks and a marketer: "Everyone has a website, we've got to have a website. We'll put FAQs on it, that way we won't need to waste money on a Help Desk."Today my ink cartridge quit in the middle of note taking. My first. How to change it? Go to the website, find a forum question. Answer: Start up the Livescribe desktop software and read the Help page. Doing that takes you BACK to the website where one is instructed to... Grab the cartridge, pull it out and stick the new one in. Why not just say that in the first place??? That is so typical of Livescribe customer support.
Then, several pages of notes later, I upload the notes and they look like I never lifted the pen from the paper. Back to the website where I find that these things might happen -So, twist the cartridge 90 degrees, make sure it isn't bent.... Why not say that back on the first page? Or the Help screen??? An hour of notes -useless.
Earlier this year I went for a long time waiting for them to get their software caught up with some bug or other. Meanwhile my pen was sitting with notes on it that I couldn't get off. Try troubleshooting that.
So today I went to leave a comment on the website and was told I have never registered -it doesn't recognize my email address. Bull. And the spam I get begging me to give their pen as Christmas gifts somehow knows my email address. So, I leave my comment here: I'm about ready to put this thing away, simply because of the customer service.
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In my first review I said I loved it. I did. Worked like a charm for about 6 months. After purchasing it, LiveScribe came out with an update called "Connect". When I installed it, Windows will no longer recognize the program. LiveScribe Support does not support the program. I was told to simply reinstall it. I did that too.It's very expensive, really does little for the cost; I recommend purchasing a digital recorder. It's cheaper and you won't have to buy the expensive DOT paper to turn the thing on and off.
I bought it for taking minutes of the meeting and it worked great then. Tried it again today, same story, same error.
So, you decide. Would I buy another. At first yes, Now, NO WAY! Save your money!
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The pen worked great for about two months, not enough to even last through a quarter of school. Thought it was absolutely awesome when it was working, just be careful because once you get comfortable with it, something will go wrong. It first started doing weird things, like turning back on a couple seconds after I turned it off. I contacted customer support and they told me to download the new firmware. Seemed easy enough, except now my computer doesn't even detect the pen anymore! I'm not alone on this, if you check out the livescribe forum () on their website it'll be apparent a lot of people are having this problem. They can't seem to get their firmware updates working. I wish there was a downgrade feature for the firmware. So what started as a possible hardware issue compounded into a software issue and now my laptop acts funny when I'm trying to connect the pen. I just spent ~$200 on a pen that quits working right when finals are coming up and is too useless to even use as a paperweight. Make sure to have a backup if you buy these products, and be wary of firmware updates.Save 13% Off
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