Livescribe Smart Pen – Now In Australia

It appears that the Livescribe Pulse smartpen has made it’s way discretely into Australia, and it appears that I have bought one of the first in the country.

As I was driving home from a meeting last night (Tuesday the 7^th October) my wife rang me to tell me that there was a new Officeworks brochure that had been delivered (no, she doesn’t usually ring me for such banal things). The interest in this Officeworks brochure was the fact that on the front page, dead center and occupying the largest part of the page was a digital pen. In fact it was a Livescribe Pulse Digital pen or smart pen as they call it.

They are on sale for $199.

Needless to say that I have been trying to get my hands on one of these for awhile now and I was quite excited about  the prospect of getting to try one out. So as it was about 6.30pm I swung via an Officeworks store on my way home to see if I could get one.

In the store I looked around but couldn’t see them, so I asked one of the staff and he told me that they weren’t going on sale until tomorrow (Wed 8^th October).

I had a bit of a chat and asked really nicely (it pays to be nice to people) if I could possibly get one. He told me that they hadn’t even opened the boxes yet and hadn’t set up a display etc so I wouldn’t be able to test it. I explained that I was quite familiar with the technology and I assurred him that I didn’t need to test it out to see what happened. Needless to say, he agreed to go and find one for me, which he promptly did. So it would appear that I have purchased one of the first Livescribe digital pens in the country (or at least in Queensland).

There hasn’t been much fanfare in regards to the release of the system here in Australia. I am a subscriber to the Livescribe newsletter and regularly check their website, but nothing has been announced there. I wonder if they are just testing it out before they go for the big release.

It appears that Officeworks has exclusive access to the Livescribe pen, at least for now.

I haven’t had much time to play with it as I am currently sitting on the 5am flight from Brisbane to Melbourne, (I’m off the plane now, have a nice cup of coffee from Hudson while I upload this) but from the brief exposure I have had, it seems to be a pretty easy to use device. The pack comes with:

·         1 Pulse Smartpen,

·         1 set of stereo headphones (which have built in microphones to generate 3D sound),

·         2 spare ink cartridges,

·         a stylus (which is very handy – it is the same size as an ink cartridge but allows you to draw & write without leaving ink on the page),

·         a USB docking/charging,

·         a 100 page note book with gadgets and a pen carry case.

My first impression was that there was no lid for the pen & no clip, so you can’t actually carry in your shirt pocket. This seems to be a fairly serious oversight in my mind. It might not be a problem for the student market where it is probably not cool to have a pen in your top pocket, but if they are trying to gain traction in the corporate/executive market, then I do see that as a barrier to easy use.

I will write a detailed review of the system shortly when I have the time to play thoroughly, however here are some initial observations:

·         Pen is a great size, much thinner than the Logitech IO2, Nokia and similar size to the Maxell digital pens.

·         It has a small screen on the pen that shows relevant things such as time, date, battery charge level, and the handwriting recognition (although that is very limited). They also have some nice little demos using the video and 3D sound they use.

·         No Bluetooth – therefore no sending files via mobile device – docking station only.

·         No output to Word or other word processing tools by the look of it, it keeps it as image only – but does allow you to search for terms that you have written. That search ability indicates that they do handwriting recognition, so maybe the output to Word will come in a future release.

·         Very easy to set up with a great little quick start guide. The quick start guide is even printed with the Anoto dot pattern, so you use the pen on it to set up date, time and even whether you are left or right handed.

·         Pen gadgets – these are printed bits of paper with things such as calculators and sound & video demos. The calculator is cool, tap in the query on the calculator and the answer is displayed on the screen.

·         Translation demo. This could be a hugely powerful tool if they can get this right. There are about 20 words in their demo suit that you can translate into Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic and Swedish. Tap the language box on your demo card and then write the word, it will automatically translate the English word into the selected language and play that out of the pens speaker. If/when they can get a full vocabulary for these languages, then it will be sensational for overseas travellers. Imagine sitting in a café in Shanghai and writing that you want a beer and some spring rolls – simply write it down, tap on the words and they are read out to your waitress.

 Just to clarify - the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen uses Anoto digital pen & paper technology. This is the standard for all quality digital pen solutions.

Overall, it seems like a great package, technically a great product with a lot of uses and future scope.

I’ll go through some greater details soon.

View a sample Livescribe text and audio I did while listening to a flight safety presentation here.

Brad