Create Digital Copies of Your Notes with Livescribe Pulse Digital Smartpen

The Livescribe Pulse Digital Smartpen creates digital copies of everything you write by hand while recording audio at the same time. It also goes one step further and links the two together, so you can quickly access audio by tapping parts of your notes. It also offers features like a calculator, translator, and a paper piano that plays a mini piano you draw on paper.

It's a product for the likes of students, journalists, or even doctors, who are constantly scribbling things down with a pen.

The Goods:
1. The Livescribe Pulse uses special dotted paper for spatial recognition to digitally replicate the notes. In one regard, this is good, because it doesn't require any secondary hardware.
2. All the functions like note-taking, digital recording and replay work nice and smooth. All you have to do is hit the record button on the paper before you begin to write, and it simultaneously records the audio and keeps the two linked. When you stop recording, you can tap anywhere near your notes and it will playback the audio from that moment when you were writing.
3. The Desktop software archives your notes according to the notebook they were written in and the page it was on. It also has a search engine with handwriting recognition that works exceptionally well.
4. It comes with an OLED screen that displays useful information, stereo microphone, loud speaker, and a magnetic dock/data connector.

The Bads:
1. You can’t just use any piece of paper to make this thing fully functional. Because each sheet of paper has controls on the bottom, allowing navigation of the pens menu system, recording controls, bookmarking, playback controls, and speaker volume.
2. It doesn't currently support OS X right now.
3. The settings can only be adjusted by the interfaces printed on the inside covers of notebooks. There's no on-screen system for adjusting this using the cross-based navigation.
4. The translator isn’t working except for a demo that translates 20 words into Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish or Swedish.
5. It does not support cursive writing.
6 It’s a bit cumbersome as you have to hold the pen relatively high so as not to block the sensor.
Priced at $199 the Livescribe Pulse Digital Smartpen offers good value for your money.