Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Edit (September 2014): After about two years, the LCD screen on the pen got very dim (almost unreadable in daylight) which, according to the Livescribe Getsatisfaction board, is a widespread issue affecting many users. There is no fix and Livescribe appears to be blaming "improper care" for the devices rather than admitting to a design flaw. Obviously the warranty is out, so the pen (and all the journals I stocked up on) is borderline useless now. Very disappointed, will have to look at competing products. Pros: great capacity, good built-in notes search, good syncing options, unmatched digital note taking Cons: plastic cracks, cap easy to lose, tiny magnet holding the cardridge falls out, weak built-in microphone, not compatible with RDP, no easy way to backup old notebooks/notes, third party apps required for transcribing Let me start off by saying that I love my Livescribe Echo 2Gb smartpen for digital note taking, but that is has its limitations. I have owned and used it exclusively for note taking for over a year now and I feel that I can provide a lot of feedback on the quality and features of the thing. I have gone through just over 300 notebook pages (the large A4 format type) and half a dozen ink cartridges with this pen and here is the quick summary of my experiences (I will dive into each one later): - digital note taking is great, especially the ability to search your hand-wiring in the native application - export feature (Livescribe Connect) is gimmicky, but supports Evernote (or, for corporate users OneNote) - physical quality is acceptable, but has some weak spots (plastic, cap and tiny magnet holding the cardridge up) - voice recording quality is below optimal, frankly, I had given up using this functionality on this pen Digital Note Taking and Livescribe Desktop I love the digital note taking with this pen, which enables me to not have to store/carry all my notebooks around with me. The Livescribe Desktop application natively, with no tuning, does a very good job at searching the handwritten notes for keywords (it seems to do so by "guessing" at the closest dictionary word it can find, so searching for "standard" words is more effective than searching for special terms or personal shorthand. However, the Livescribe application has two major drawbacks - it cannot be used via RDP (Microsoft Remote Desktop application for remote system access), it's an acknowledged by support limitation making the whole system lock up for some reason and there is no way to back up your notes from the Livescribe application. Let me explain the latter in more detail - the notes are stored on the pen, and then synced to the Livescribe Desktop application. If you then "Archive" the notes from your pen to make more room - the only copy will then exist in the Livescribe Desktop application. If you upgrade your PC - there is no easy way to export the notes from the old Livescribe Desktop application and import them into the new one, on your new PC. The official support recommendation is to manually locate and copy-paste application installation folders between the corresponding location on each computer... gimmicky. You could of course export your notes into PDF or Evernote, but then you can never again get them back into the Livescribe Desktop to enjoy native search or custom notebook creation. Transcribing I had great hopes for automatic transcribing of my notes with this product. Wouldn't it be great to take some quick handwritten notes and have them be typed up for you with a push of a button? Sure it would, I wish I could find something that could do it. Don't get me wrong - there are way to do sort of do it with this product, through a third party transcribing app like MyScript or Microsoft OneNote Ink-to-Text feature, but the accuracy of them guessing your hand writing is rather poor out of the box, and "training" them requires additional stylus-type input hardware for your PC (there is an app to make the smartpen act as one, but it costs money and is not very useable, see applications section below). Physical Quality of the Pen The physical quality of the pen is... sufficient. It has not quite disintegrated after a year of daily usage, however there is a number of wear and tear issues that I have observed: the inner cover of the pen cap had fallen off and gotten lost, making it hollow (does not affect functionality); the cap itself is tiny and bares no attachment to the pen when removed (so I have periodically misplaced in or around my desk many and many time), the plastic on the bottom half of the pen has cracked right under the microphone opening, with the crack worryingly growing longer and longer and last but not least - there is a tiny, and I mean *tiny* (less than 1 mm in diameter) magnet inside the tip of the pen, directly above the cartridge that is responsible for holding the cartridge in place, which falls out. Now, if it falls out and you lose this microscopic magnet (and I got lucky there - I noticed it fall and managed to find it in the carpet with a fridge magnet), your pens performance will be significantly reduced through the ink cartridge becoming "floppy" when you write, resulting in inaccurate ink detection and thus reduced readability and search performance for the digital notes. This is a definite design flaw and I highly recommend gluing that magnet in with some super glue when you get your pen. Voice Recording The voice recording aspect of the product is highly-marketed as a differentiating factor, and it does have a very solid feature implementation from recording controls, to playback on the pan and in the Livescribe Desktop application, to exporting into playable PDFs (this is kind of cool, I had no idea PDFs could do that). But as I mentioned earlier in my post - I had all but given up on using any of this wonderful functionality for one simple reason - the microphone on this pen sucks. It will pick up you talking just fine, but for it to reliably pick up the voice of your conversation partner (presenter, professor, etc) - they would have to be literally hugging you. To make matters worse, if you use the pen to write something down while recording voice notes, the microphone picks up the sound of the pen gliding across the paper, louder than it does the voice you're recording. There is only one remedy to this and it is to remember to carry with you and use the external microphone headset, which eliminates the pen scratching sounds and somewhat improves the voice reception... but it dangles when you write, affecting your writing speed and accuracy; and again you have to remember to carry it with you. Applications A word about "applications" - they do exist. The piano one is neat to show to people who have never seen the product or kids who need to be entertained while you're trying to talk to their parents. The translation application is also neat, but I don't see wasting notes space for writing random words to be translated for your listener particularly practical in the day and age of smartphone voice translation apps. Only app I actually tries using was the use-your-smarpen-as-your-PC-stylus one, and it works, but is very difficult to map to your screen dimensions and requires a USB cable to be connected to your computer, making it difficult to write (see the headset comment above). Conclusion In conclusion, if all your are looking for is digitizing (not transcribing, digitizing) your notes - this is a perfect product for you. However any of the much touted additional features and functionality (export, sharing, voice recording, applications, etc), although present, should not be your primary reason for getting this smartpen. They are nice to have if you need them occasionally, but if you rely on them for day to day operations they will be extremely time consuming to tune and leverage and will frustrate you to no end.