![]() By tapping a Record button on a printed page, you start recording a lecture or other spoken words as you write. Instead of requiring you to cycle through your recorded audio to find the clip you want, the Echo ties audio to your written notes. The coolest thing about the Echo (and the Pulse before it) is its ability to record and play back audio–with an innovative twist. ![]() It also adds a few new features to the mix. The new Echo pen packs more memory (4GB for $170 or 8GB for $200) and a sleeker, more-ergonomic design than its predecessor, the Pulse. Those early-adopter students, journalists, and stenographers can rejoice: Livescribe’s second-generation smartpen, dubbed the Echo, has arrived. The time you'd save not scanning through hours of recording for a handful of important sound-bites is worth its wait in gold, but then you add the pencasts you can create, the apps you can install, the ability to use the Echo as a tablet input for your PC, and you have a powerful tool for people in a range of professions.The first-generation Livescribe Pulse smartpen attracted a cult following among students and heavy note-takers, thanks to its innovative approach to digitizing, organizing, and tying audio to handwritten notes. When you can buy a Dictaphone for under AU$100 and a pad and paper for about AU$10, the RRP seems steep, but the bonus functionality definitely wins us over. The Echo smartpen comes in two storage options, a 4GB model for AU$259 and an 8GB pen for AU$299, with Livescribe estimating about 100 hours of recording per gigabyte. ![]() A five-pack of ink cartridges costs AU$14.95. Livescribe gave us a box of replacement nibs and we're lucky it did, the pens had a tendency to clog up with ink and we replaced them more frequently than we felt we should have to. Though we looked hard to find flaws in the technology aspect of the pen, our other major gripe was about the quality of ballpoint on the pen itself. The Echo has a micro-USB port on top for data transfers and charging, but if you're away from a computer collecting data it'd be nice to have an alternative to PC charging. Firstly, there's no travel adapter bundled with the pen. There are apps that turn dots and lines into musical notation, currency converters, as well as things you'd expect to see, like an app that transforms your handwriting into digitised text for word processors.Īfter a few weeks with the Echo we can't fault the software or features of this marvellous gadget, but we did notice a few simple oversights. ![]() Yep, we're talking about apps, and even in its infancy the app store for Livescribe pens is filling up with some truly mind-boggling utilities. LiveScribe has followed in the footsteps of smartphone manufacturers and created a system that allows third-party developers to take advantage of the tools on offer. The piano, for example, has you draw nine short, vertical lines connected by two long, horizontal lines, then tap inside the rectangles you've drawn to play the notes. All of these tools require pen and paper input, with the computer inside the pen interpreting your keystrokes to perform the different tasks. Out of the box, the Livescribe Echo has a built-in scientific calculator, a demo for a language translator, a poker video game and - wait for it - a piano. Recording audio while you write is nice, creating animations on the fly is fantastic, but we're still just peering at the tip of this techno iceberg.
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