Everyone who takes notes should have a Livescribe pen?but maybe not this one, at least not yet. The new Sky Wifi Smartpen?($169.95-$249.95 direct) lets you take synchronized ink and audio notes on paper. In theory, it effortlessly uploads those notes to the Internet, where you can check them on any device capable of running Evernote. In practice, the software isn't quite finished yet.
First, paper. While many people take notes on laptops nowadays, there are still a lot of places where paper is better. Laptops are awkward when you're standing up. When you're interviewing someone, a laptop creates a visual and psychological barrier that makes them a little less likely to open up.
Phone and tablet note-taking apps such as Evernote and Skitch try to fill the gap, but they can't quite make it. There's a little too much lag, and tablet styli aren't precise enough for you to write small, and the lack of friction makes it difficult to write without looking at the screen.
Enter the Livescribe. Paired with special notebooks, this digital pen lets you take ordinary notes on paper, sync them with audio recordings, and play the notes back later. Tap on any point in your writing and you'll hear what was recorded at that moment. Livescribe calls synced ink-and-audio recordings "pencasts."
I've used a Livescribe pen for years, and it's indispensable in my line of work. Syncing the ink with audio recordings means I can go back into any point of any interview, checking to see exactly what someone said. It makes quoting people much, much easier.?
Reach for the Sky
The Sky uses the same body and paper as the earlier 0.5-by-6.2-by-0.8 inch, 1.3 ounce Livescribe Echo , although it traded out the Echo's soft-touch barrel for a less-useful shiny silver-gray one. Both pens are large and somewhat flattened, with a small 12-character LED display on the front, a Power button, and USB and headphone jacks on the top. Yes, it feels more like a marker than like a pen, but as someone who's taken notes for eight hours straight with a Livescribe, I can tell you it isn't too heavy.
The actual 'pen' part is just a ballpoint tip that fits into a slot in the front of the pen. You can buy five-packs of tips for $6.95 and they come in black, blue, or red. The tips themselves just feel like cheap ballpoints. They're a little scratchy, but they get the job done. They don't smear, and the fine points are quite fine.
With ink, you need paper. The pen comes bundled with a 50-sheet, spiral-bound notebook to get you started. I prefer the 200-page black journals, which run $25 for two, but you can also get different styles of notebooks and notepads, for about $9-$14 each. If you have a 600dpi laser (not inkjet) printer, you can also print your own paper.
Then you're ready to get started. Charge the pen via the micro USB port with the included cable, switch it on, and you're recording what you write. Tap on a little icon on the special paper, and you're recording what the pen hears, synced up. The pen's microphone is heavily biased towards nearby sounds, which is fine if you're interviewing somebody one-on-one, but in meetings, you have to turn up the volume to hear people at the other end of a long table.
The Sky comes in three models: a 2GB version for $169.95, a 4GB version for $199.95, and an 8GB version for $249.95. All three come with 500MB of Evernote storage (enough for 50-75 hours of audio) and the most expensive model comes with a year's worth of Evernote Premium, a $45 value. As far as I'm concerned, since you'll probably sync the pen at least once a day, there's little reason to get the higher-storage models. I tested the 2GB model.
Unfinished Integration
The Sky's major shift is in ditching Livescribe's old, balky desktop software in exchange for Wi-Fi-based integration with Evernote. That's a great idea, but it needs another software rev before it works properly. You lose the oddball Java apps that used to run on the Echo pen, but super-easy syncing with any device is worth the trade-off.
Here's the idea: You set up the Sky with a Wi-Fi network using an easy login process. Every time you stop an audio recording, it uploads your audio and ink to Evernote, where it appears online. If, while you're recording, you're not within range of the Wi-Fi network, everything will be uploaded as soon as you return to the network. And since Evernote works with nearly every PC, tablet, and smartphone in existence, you can read back your notes on anything.
That's the theory. In practice, it's awkward. I'll set aside the bugs, which Livescribe says will be fixed by launch. Even beyond that, audio notes arrived with the wrong times attached to them and no obvious sign of which note was associated with which page. In my tests, clicking on ink notes to play audio spawned a separate Web window, the Livescribe Player, so you can't play synced audio when offline, at all. You also can't alter the speed of the audio playback, a feature from the old desktop software that I really miss.
Individual pages appear as separate notes in Evernote, even though most note-taking sessions involve a bunch of pages. Audio recordings appear as different notes, without a clear guide as to which audio notes are connected to which pages. Since the audio notes are interleaved with the text notes, you can't flip through pages naturally. Some of my audio notes didn't show up in Evernote until hours after I took them, and then they all appeared in a batch.
Fortunately, all of the on-pen playback functionality still works fine. You can plug headphones into your pen, tap on ink in your paper notebook and hear what you recorded. You can speed up and slow down playback by tapping on icons in the notebook. But this is a step backwards in functionality: Livescribe took away useful Echo features like controlling playback speed and the optional MyScript handwriting recognition without replacing them yet. Those features may be coming, but they're not here today.
Also, struggling with Wi-Fi kills the Sky's battery. On one test day, the pen had terrible trouble syncing, and I ended up with just 4.5 hours of heavy note taking and audio recording on a single charge. Better connectivity on a different day pushed the battery life closer to six hours of audio before I needed to recharge.
If you don't have Wi-Fi, you can sync with Evernote using a cable and a desktop helper app, which wasn't available for me to review.
Hoping for Better
Livescribe is a cool technology and the Sky is a great idea. But it needs upgrades both to the pen firmware and to Evernote to realize its potential. Syncing needs to be quick and efficient, and Evernote should showcase pencasts, not separate them into their text and audio components or have to launch a helper app.
The whole idea of pencasts is the integration between text and audio; the whole idea of a notebook is a seamless, easy to flip through sequence of pages. By breaking every page into a separate note, it's difficult to cruise through the notes you took in a session. By interleaving the audio notes as separate content, it breaks up the experience. By forcing it to spawn the Web-based player to play your synced notes, it adds a step.
That said, Livescribe tells me that a lot of positive changes are coming over the next few months. This is a radical shift in direction for the company; it's sort of like having a version 1.0 all over again.
I'd advise that Livescribe owners stick with their current pens until the software here improves. If you're a student, journalist, therapist, or other frequent note-taker who also has a Mac or PC, you can pick up this pen and agree to bear with what is sure to be an improving software experience, or go with the Echo, which syncs with Livescribe's balky, but at least consistent, desktop software.
We'll revisit this review in a few months after the software is improved. I like where Livescribe is going, it justs need a little more time to get there.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/rjXCHe_uExM/0,2817,2411149,00.asp
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