Review: the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen

What we like: recording audio makes note-taking much simpler,  searchable pdfs make studying faster, has a range of other great tools for students

What we don’t: lack of some more advanced features, such as the ability to animate drawings

In the box:

• Pulse smartpen
• Livescribe Desktop software
• 3-D Recording Headset
• 100-sheet college-ruled dot paper notebook
• USB Cradle
• Smartpen case
• 3 black fine point ink cartridges
• 1 stylus cartridge
• Demo card and stickers
• Interactive getting started guide

Price in-store: $149.99 (1GB), $199.99 (2GB)

What we think:The Pulse Smartpen is truly the ultimate companion for any student or journalist. Not only does it record all of the notes you take and automatically generate PDF files of them, it will also record audio while you write and link it to what you were writing at the time. You can play back these recordings within the software, or simply by touching the pen to the page. The pen features a built-in microphone and speaker, as well as a proprietary headset that allows you to record and listen to audio in three dimensions (hard to explain, but it’s really cool). Beyond your notes, the pen has a variety of additional features such as the ability to do complex math equations and translate select words into other languages.

You do need to use Livescribe’s specialized dot paper and ink cartridges in order for the pen to work. To this end, Livescribe offers notebooks in a variety of styles (we’re big fans of the moleskine-esqe ones), sheafs of looseleaf, and a downloadable template from their website for you to print yourself.

What we love the most about using the Pulse smartpen is how it affects our note-taking; rather than trying to scribble down every last detail of our lectures, we simply write down key words and phrases and let the audio recording do the rest of the work for us. We find that this lets us pay much more attention to the lecture itself while avoiding hand cramps.

Rating (out of 10): 8