Echo Smart Pen - Make Your Notes Work For You

My Echo Smart Pen was delivered yesterday, and I am having fun playing with it. It is, however, a serious piece of tech, and uses an infrared camera next to a ball point pen and special dotted paper to record every stroke. I love that I can take notes as I always have, with pen and ink on paper, and the dots are invisible to the eye on the special paper. While expensive, the paper notebooks are not out of line, and you can write on both sides. 4 200 page books cost around $24, and the ink refills are no more expensive than any ballpoint pen. While I would prefer writing on yellow legal pads, I am getting used to the white pages of the LiveScribe notebooks. Come to think of it, I have used white legal pads before, and never thought about page color. While the newer version of the pen, the LiveScribe 3 transfers pages to the phone or tablet by Bluetooth, I like the fact that I can hook the USB cable to my desktop with the Echo, and automatically transfer the pages to Windows as PDFs. Then, I can send them to MyScript for conversion to text, or store them in any folder on the computer. So, when I take notes about a particular matter, I can just click and share them with the client folder on the computer. I wish I had been using this pen much longer. With all the peripherals, and a leather binder and case for the pen, I spent less than $180 on Amazon. Get the 8 GB version, and you can store thousands of pages of text. The pen will need recharging after 8 to 10 hours of use; but, you can plug it in to any USB port at night. I am in the habit of charging my Bluetooth Headset, and SmartWatch at night already, so this shouldn't be a problem. By the way, with your Smartphone on your belt or in yuour pocket, your SmartWatch on your wrist, your Bluetooth Headset in your ears or on your neck, putting this SmartPen in your shirt pocket makes for a real wearable computing revolution. I suppose a computer carried in your briefcase completes the geek lawyer picture. I will keep updates coming, as I use the device. For now, it is a go. Write on.

Comments

[Tom Stirewalt]

. Looking forward to the comments on turning handwriting into text. Please let us know about the percentages of successes depending upon how "carefully" you write. Scribble, normal, take your time to make it pretty, and printing.
. I have tried those things that clip to the top of a legal-type pad and use something like infra-red to keep track of your pen. Not that good of an experience. Scanning the sheets of paper worked better. Alas, no OCR.