The paper is printed with millions of microscopic dots, letting a camera in the pen determine your precise location on the page, so it can digitize your notes and drawings. As with all Livescribes, you write in special notebooks sold by the company, or - if you’ve got a color laser printer - on paper you’ve printed yourself. To use the Livescribe 3 as a writing instrument, you give its barrel a twist, which turns the pen on and readies it to capture your writing. (It may be a little too removable: It fell off in my backpack, and I fear that the odds of it eventually going missing are high.)ĭigitized notes in the Livescribe+ app for the iPad The USB connector on the pen’s top is cleverly concealed by a removable tip that lets you use that end of the Livescribe to write on your device’s touchscreen. But the built-in recording that’s still available in the Echo and Sky models is simpler and less conspicuous.Īnother clue that the Livescribe is designed to complement an iPad or iPhone: It doubles as a stylus. As long as you have your Apple device handy and don’t mind plopping it on a table before you start to record, the end result is much the same as with previous Livescribes, and you can avoid picking up the scritch-scratching of your writing. As with other models, you can record audio while you take notes, then sync up the results into a sharable “Pencast.” But instead of recording the sound on its own, the 3 works with an iOS app that captures audio directly to your phone or tablet while you write with the pen. Some of this stuff is missing because Livescribe designed this pen to serve as an accesory for an iPhone or iPad. Actually, it’s missing some features in previous Livescribes, such as built-in audio recording and the ability to run apps on a tiny screen and send notes to Evernote via Wi-Fi. And though it’s the company’s most luxe-feeling product so far - it looks a bit like a jumbo-sized fountain pen - it also isn’t really the new flagship.
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The Livescribe 3 doesn’t replace either of its other two current products, the Sky and Echo. Livescribe, the highest-profile company in the smartpen biz, pretty much jump-started the category with its first model back in 2008. Everything that you put down on paper gets digitized and sent to your iPhone or iPad, where you can refer to it later, share it with other people or transfer it to other applications.Įxecutive summary for those who don’t feel like reading the rest of this review: As long as you can live with its dependence on special paper, the Livescribe 3 is a much more satisfying, less frustrating take on the concept than the inventive-but-quirky Equil Jot. But unlike your 29-cent Bic, these pens, both of which sell for $150, are battery-powered and Bluetooth-enabled. They’re both ballpoints, so you can record information with ink in a paper notebook, just as you’ve done since you learned to write in the first place. Two new products - Livescribe’s Livescribe 3 and Equil’s Jot - aim to do exactly that. That’s not to say that you can’t bridge the gap between pen and phone. Which is why so many folks continue to do their note-taking and doodling with real, liquid ink on actual, dead-tree paper - including plenty of hardcore gadget freaks who wouldn’t think of being caught without a smartphone on their person.
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![charging equil note charging equil note](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/screen-shot-2014-10-07-at-2-30-44-pm.png)
Follow it comes to input devices, it’s always been tough to top the pocketable, affordable, utterly intuitive device known as the pen.