Livescribe 2GB Pulse Smartpen (APA-00002)

 (140 customer reviews)

My brother ordered two of these pens when they were first available from the manufacturer. His thinking apparently was that he would have a backup should he ever lose one. Quickly realizing that he might have over-ordered, he offered one to me to try.

There were a lot of reasons I was not enthusiastic about his offer. The first was that unlike my brother, I actually do lose pens from time to time, even expensive ones. So if I lost this thing I would owe my brother money. Second, I am a Mac enthusiast and the desktop software for a Mac platform will not be available until the end of 2008. Finally, the necessity of the product escaped me.

But being a toy lover I put aside my objections and accepted his loan. A few weeks later I was calling customer support on a desktop issue (I installed it on my only Windows computer, a Toshiba tablet). The problem was a software glitch, since in reality the pen was still in beta. The customer service rep solving the problem asked...Read more

This product was prematurely launched. It does not record lectures very well at all in typical lecture halls, regardless whether or not you wear the dorky earphones and regardless what setting you select for sound recording. Any ambient noise, no matter how quiet, will be picked up by the device. This noise will completely mask the speaker's voice, rendering the recording essentially useless.

Because the file formats are proprietary, you cannot load the noisy files into audio processing software to filter out the noise or amplify the speaker's voice. The need for the headphones (which serve as microphones) makes the pen obtrusive in a corporate environment, where one may want to save audio recordings of meetings while taking notes.

The pen has a built in microphone, but it is useless in a large room. It is often recommended that one use the headphones (wearing them around one's neck), but in normal environments with air conditioning or computers nearby, the only...Read more

The pen does what it says but if you have used the Leapfrog Fly Fusion pen - which is the company the founder came from - you expect that it will convert your writing to text - but it doesn't.

The company promises to do this but has not delivered on their promise and since the pen has been out since at least April - I feel it is long overdue. They could give one access to the digital audio which then would enable the user of the pen to use another text conversion program -- but they don't or won't.

The other problem is the tease of the apps like language translator - which the pen does but only as demo so far.

What the pen does do - it does it fantastically - so if you are a student of someone just wanting to have a verbal recording of something and the ability to take notes that associate the recording so that it is easy to find what you want right away - it does that very well.

The problem is that all digital recording devices do this too...Read more