Eclectic Memes

When I start or end a contract I buy myself a ‘treat’. This time I bought something I’ve been hanging my nose over for a couple of years. I did not buy it when I first saw it because the Mac software was missing some features that I considered essential. Then being out of contract meant that it was out of budget.

So what is it? It’s one of these.

I’ve only had time to unbox it and take it for a very quick test drive but DAMN it’s good!

A quick explanation for those not inclined to dig through their web site. The Pulse pen is one seriously neat piece of technology. It is about the size of a slim whiteboard marker and weighs about the same. The tip of the pen consist of a Biro style nib and a small camera. It operates as any normal pen until you write on paper that is marked with very tiny dots. The pattern of the dots communicates to the pen (through the camera) the precise position of the pen tip. The pen also registers when the tip is in contact with the paper. These two pieces of information allow the pen to record exactly what is being written (and, as we shall see shortly, much more besides).

The accuracy of this recording is impressive.

If that were all the pen did I would be recommending alternative, cheaper, solutions. But the Pulse does more. Much more.

The first, and most significant, party trick is that the pen also records audio. So it is a pen and dictation machine in one. This in itself is neat, but the if you write while recording the pen synchronises what is written with what is recorded. Once you finish recording you can play back the audio that corresponds with any piece of the written notes simply by tapping on or close to the written note. Audio playback starts 5 second (by default) before the point you wrote the note you tapped.

The audio recording is outstanding (although on quiet recordings you also get some background from the sound of the pen on the paper, but this is a minor issue). The audio recordings I have made so far with the pen’s internal mic are excellent.

If the internal mic is not sufficient (and Livescribe themselves do not recommend the internal mic when recording in high noise environments such as a large auditorium) you can plug in the combined stereo mic and headphones. This provides full binaural recordings that are synchronised with your notes.

So, we now have record and playback of both written and audio notes. Both writing and audio facilities can also be used independently too.

I said earlier that the camera did much more than simply track the pen’s movement on the page and so it does. Each page is uniquely identified. So if you write a note on the first page of your notebook, then write in another notebook and return to the first to add some notes to the first page, the pen knows that you are writing on the first page of the first notebook again and integrates the new note into the original page recording. The audio is similarly synchronised.

If you make an audio only recording and then later decide to make some written notes you can play back the audio and, as the playback proceeds, write notes into your notebook. The audio is synchronised with the new written notes.

As if this were not enough the Pulse has another trick up it’s sleeve. In the cover of the larger notebooks are printed representations of a calculator and a keyboard. Tapping the buttons on these with the tip of the pen results in the pen display showing the results. So, tapping the calculator buttons causes the calculation and its result to be displayed on the pen’s OLED display. Similarly tapping the keyboard results in typed text.

And there’s more. The pen contains contains some applications (and there is an application store to add more). These applications include a calculator that once initiated will recognise a written calculation and will produce the result once the ‘=’ sign is written, through to a piano. To use the piano you draw a piano keyboard on the page and then tap out tunes on the drawn keys. Okay, not especially useful, but kinda cool in a geeky way.

Another application is the translator. With this, you select the target language, say Spanish, then write out the word to be translated and the pen then speaks the translate word. Probably not a feature I will use, but a neat tool if you need it and a geeky tick if you don’t.

The special notebooks come in a variety of sizes and though not cheap are not ridiculously priced. Additionally the desktop tool that accompanies the pen can be used to print new pages providing your printer is sufficiently high quality to produce accurate 600dpi output.

The pen’s 4Gb of memory allow for about 400hrs of stored audio and many, many pages of notes, to be held on the pen itself.

When the pen is connected to the desktop software all the notes are uploaded to the desktop application where they can be subsequently viewed and played back much as they can from the pen.

A third-party add-on to the desktop application provides handwriting recognition. Once notes are in the desktop application a single click converts them to type. This feature is useful because it makes your notes indexable by the OS X spotlight system. The recognition is incredibly accurate for straightforward linear notes written on the lines of the paper, but falls apart when text is written at an angle. It did a creditable job with my spider scrawl. If you mainly write linear textual notes then the handwriting recognition will probably work well for you (it’s available on a 30-day free trial).

Notes and accompanying audio can also be uploaded to your private area on the LiveScribe website where they are rendered into interactive Flash so that they work much the same way as they do on the desktop. These Flash versions of your notes can be made public and available to others, sharied on Facebook or embedding in websites.

When a physical notebook is full you upload it from the pen to the desktop application and archive it. This allows that notebooks identity to be reused. (Notebooks are numbered and you can only have one of each number and type active at a time. So if you are using A4 notebook number one you cannot use another A4 notebook one at the same time. You must open, for example, A4 notebook number 2 or journal number1.)

When all said and done this product has, so far, impressed me immensely as a well thought out and useful piece of technology.