Livescribe Echo Smartpen Review

I’ve been using this smartpen for a few weeks now and its a great toy. More than that, it closes the loop on the last spoke of that tough to fix get it all digital and searchable wheel. So, what is a smartpen? Well, essentially, its a paper and ink writing tool which uses special paper and a small camera in the end of the pen to digitise your scribblings, while optionally recording and linking audio to the text, for transfer to your computer for storage and further processing.
I got the Livescribe Echo 2Gb, and this was a good choice for my needs. There are several component to making this smartpen part of your daily routine. I’ll go through them one by one.

The Pen
The actual pen is pretty good, but not great as a design. I was anxious that it would be too chunky, but actually its pretty comfortable in my, admittedly large’ish, male hands. Aesthetically, looking at the pen from the side, it has a nicely gentle vaguely-elliptical shape. Its pleasing to view. From the top, less so. In order to fit a headphone (and stereo microphone jacks) socket and micro-usb (for charging and sync’ing) the pen is slightly spoilt for me, as it flares at the top. I believe the 4Gb and 8Gb models have a rubberised grip area, the 2Gb doesn’t. I’d imagine that it would be nice, but its not a show-stopper and you probably add 50% or more to the price of the pen for that and a few other minor (for me) upgrades. I couldn’t stomach that when I wasn’t sure that I’d make good use of the pen. The cap, it plain, awful. Its fine when on, but very difficult to get off. My hand strength is pretty good, I climb rocks for a hobby, but the pen lid required too much effort to get off. After struggling to get my nails under it, I’ve figured out there is a trick to push the lid forward and backward first, which makes it easier to remove. Its very easy to lose, I’m just waiting for this to happen. The pen is missing a clip too, I’ve ended up chucking it in my bags, where it rattles around, that’s a niggle. The fit and finish is okay, some of the seams on my model were a little misaligned with rough’ish, sharp’ish edges, and the top is a bit creaky. Its certainly not bad, but for an expensive pen, I hoped for some tighter control over manufacturing. Perhaps, I’m just over fussy and too used to Apple hardware standards.

The Paper
To make the Smartpen work, the camera picks up on tiny light blue dots on the Livescribe Paper to locate the ink & pen’s position. You get a tiny, selection of notelets when you buy the pen, but you’re going to need some more if you get one. I ended up getting a two-pack of A5 Journal pads. These are excellent, they feel like high quality notebooks. The extra bonus, is that if you have a suitable printer (don’t ask me what that means!) you can print your own paper, in booklets with, I think, 20 twenty pages or so at a go. I was a bit anxious that I’d be committing to buying expensive proprietary paper to make this pen thing any use. This is a really nice fix, if you’re in a fix. I’d still recommend getting the pre-printed materials, but its really nice to have the option if you need some in a snap or for doodling while on your desk, etc.

Desktop Software
Livescribe Desktop
The Livescribe Desktop software is functional and fine. Once installed, which is pretty standard on OSX, sorry users on other platforms, don’t know about them. It’s a little counter-intuitive in that the audio recordings which synchronise with your writing (which is great) is displayed separately from the graphical renderings of your writings.
The desktop application is the hub for doing stuff with the pen, for example, installing Apps, like Zork (which is, well, cool) or exporting to other places.

Livescribe Connect
This second application seems to need to run as well as the desktop application when you connect your pen to the computer. This seems a bit clumsy to me, but when you connect the pen via its usb cable, the Livescribe applications boot and sync. your recent data to the computer. The idea of the Connect application, I think is a mechanism to set up tunnels to different locations for your pencasts, e.g., Evernote, the desktop, email, or to google docs or sites. I should add, I’ve played with this but not found it to be of much value. Some of the functionality is limited on the basic version and you need to pay to upgrade, which seems a bit cheap on a system like this. The fundamental shortcoming, I think, is that although you can use neat while writing shortcuts to pipe your content to different places, you still need to connect the pen to the desktop to enable the process, and therefore you may as well just export the data when you at the desktop, the extra effort in minimal. Meh. Perhaps the next version will have Bluetooth or WiFi to enable remote sync’ing, its got to happen.

Myscript
One of the key components to getting your notes into your computer is linking it all together and making it searchable. There’s a bit of a mystery here for me, in that Livescribe don’t include, or even appear to own software to recognise handwriting and convert it to text. The Livescribe app store does link to Myscript an option add on to convert and export your scrawl to searchable, and editable text. This seems, obviously to me something that should be included from the get go. In use, Myscript is pretty good. The UI is poor, obviously a quick and dirty Java port, but the functionality isn’t bad at all. My writing is poor, and using the smartpen has encouraged me to try to make my script more legible, which does seem to help. However, the recognition isn’t bad at all, and can be checked with the original pretty easily. You can also choose whether to export just text or formatted text, and or images too. A recommended buy.

In use
So what’s the practical experience of using the thing. The pre-printed paper provides some rather nice control for handedness, audio playback, volume, bookmarking, even a calculator, which works well. The standard pen refills are okay to write with, not great, but okay. More on that later.
I’m finding I need to retrain myself to reduce the number of unnecessary doodles to smooth the outputs to Myscript. In use, the controls are largely intuitive and well-thought out. I’m still wrestling with a tidy way to manage separate documents or splitting notes, but one great thing about the system is that it just grabs all the stuff, and you can organise it later.

Optional Nerdology
A couple of minor drifts off into the unnecessary niceties. As mentioned above the standard pen refills are okay, a bit unrewarding to write with. A bit of digging and I found a forum post suggesting an alternative/better supplier, plus a bit of DIY. I opted for Gel refills from Cult Pens. The closest gel refill for the Echo I’ve found is the ‘Zebra JSB Gel Refill 0.5mm’ at £4.07 each, ouch! These refills are tiny, and you need to cut them down to fit the pen too! Handily, the ink actually doesn’t seem to reach up to the point you need to cut to. See the forum post for instructions, its pretty easy. Expensive, but better to write with.

One nice feature is that you can use the pen on multiple machines, with a bit of care. Great for both desktop and laptop use. If you’re weight-sensitive, you don’t want to be carrying that huge cable with your lovely pen do you? Griffin Technology to the rescue, with their ‘USB Mini Cable Kit’. Really nicely designed little cable-ettes, where you can take only what you need with you and not much else, they’re great.

Overall
The Livescribe Echo Smartpen is a genuinely useful and interesting product. Its got its limitations, and some rabbit-holes of nerdery one can run down, but on balance, a good buy, especially the current entry model which can be picked up in the UK for around £80.