Livescribe 4 GB Echo Smartpen
Livescribe 4 GB Echo Smartpen
- Smartpen with 4 GB of memory, redesigned with anti-roll body and rubberized smaller grip
- Capture thousands of pages of notes and over 800 hours of audio (recording time varies by audio quality setting)
- Share notes and recordings privately or online with 500 MB of free storage
- MicroUSB connector lets you transfer notes and audio to your Mac or PC
- Standard 3.5mm audio jack for use with your favorite earbuds
Livescribe 4 GB Echo Smartpen
Find what you need with a tap. The Echo smartpen from Livescribe records everything you hear, say and write, and links your audio recordings to your notes, so you can find what you need. Packed with useful features, the Echo Smartpen helps you put your notes to work, so they’re always accessible. The Echo smartpen records everything you hear and write, so you can find what you need with a simple tap. Ideal for meetings, conferences, or classes, this compact tool is as easy to carry as traditional pen-and-paper, but smarter. Replay your recorded audio anytime, anywhere, with a quick tap on your notes. Save and Search Using the Livescribe Desktop, you can save notes to your computer, which makes it a snap to integrate them into a report or presentation. Search for specific words or phrases within all of your notebooks, organize them they way you want, and export them locally for backup or transfer. Send and Share – Its easy to share your notes or recordings publically or privately as a PDF, audio file, or a pencast. What’s a pencast? A pencast is an interactive flash movie of your handwritten notes and audio. You can publish pencasts online, share them privately via email, or post them directly on Facebook. Applications: Customize your smartpen with downloadable apps -from dictionaries to translators, time savers, games and more. As new apps become available, your smartpen evolves with you. What You Get- The Echo smartpen; 4 GB of memory; Livescribe Desktop software for Mac or Windows (download); 500MB of personal online storage; Starter dot paper notebook; Micro USB Cable; Interactive Getting Started Guide; Smartpen Tips & Tricks Guide;2 smartpen caps 2 ink cartridges What You Need Windows XP with SP3 or Windows Vista or Windows 7. Intel-based Mac with Mac OS X 10.5.5 or later, including 10.6 600MHz CPU or higher 300 MB minimum free disk space USB 2.0 port Internet connection for software downloadThe Echo smartpen works only with Livescribe Dot Paper.
At work. In class. Find what you need with a tap. The Echo smartpen from Livescribe records everything you hear, say and write, and links your audio recordings to your notes, so you can find what you need.
Tap it. Get it.
The Echo smartpen records everything you hear and write, so you can find what you need with a simple tap. Ideal for meetings, conferences, or classes, this compact tool is as easy to carry as traditional pen-and-paper, but smarter. Replay your recorded audio anytime, anywhere, with a quick tap on your notes.
and 3.5mm headphone jack.
Echo Enhancements
Redesigned with a sleeker look and more ergonomic feel, the Echo Smartpen features a new anti-roll body that’s easier to control as well as a smaller rubberized grip that ensures the Echo won’t slip out of your hands. It also comes with 2 caps to protect the Smartpen tip. The Echo has also been outfitted with a standard Micro USB port and 3.5mm audio jack on the flattened top of the Smartpen, as well as an OLED screen on the side to make it easy to navigate and interact with applications.
New Echo features include:
Launch Line
- Draw a short line.
- Write the name of an application on top of it (e.g., “Blackjack”).
- Double-tap to select or wait a moment.
- Tap around the written word (up, down, left, right) to navigate the menu as needed.
Password
- Protect your recorded paper replay sessions in the case of a lost Smartpen
- Use a 4 digit number to protect the smartpen
- Forget your password? Reset it through your registered copy of the Livescribe Desktop software
Smartpen Name
- Give your smartpen a name when you set up Livescribe Desktop.
- The same name is briefly shown when you turn on the smartpen.
- Ideal for personalization and identification–particularly useful in office and classroom environments where multiple smartpens are in use.
4 GB of Memory
The Echo Smartpen offers 4 GB of memory to hold over 400 hours of audio or 64,000 pages of notes (actual recording time varies by audio quality setting). It works exclusively with Livescribe dot paper (starter set included), which activates all Smartpen applications.
Save, Organize, and Search
Using the Livescribe Desktop, you can upload, save and play back your notes and audio from your PC or Mac. Type in specific words or phrases in the search window, and the Livescribe Desktop will highlight every place you wrote them in your notes. Plus, you can organize your digital notes simply by dragging and dropping pages in to custom notebooks. *Note: custom notebook feature available for Mac users in September.
Send and Share
Its easy to share your notes or recordings publically or privately as a PDF, audio file, or a pencast. What’s a pencast? A pencast is an interactive flash movie of your handwritten notes and audio. You can publish pencasts online, share them privately via email, or post them directly on Facebook.
Smartpen Applications
The possibilities for Livescribe applications are endless, with tools and games that enhance personal productivity, learning, communications, and entertainment. With free and paid downloadable apps, you can read and hear a translated phrase in Spanish, French, German, Japanese or even Korean; rapidly access fun facts on a variety of topics from past World Series winners to U.S. Presidents; get help studying geometry, organic chemistry, or Hebrew chanting; play more than a dozen games like Blackjack, Video Poker or Hangman; or listen to classical music pieces–right from the ‘pentip’ of their Pulse smartpen.
Livescribe Desktop
The Livescribe Desktop software allows you to digitally transfer your notes and recordings from your Echo smartpen to your PC or Mac. See your notes animate or play your recordings. Play your notes and recordings, organize them, and search for words within your handwritten notes to find what you need.
Livescribe Community
Upload your pencasts online with the Livescribe Community for everyone to see, hear, and play. Share your notes, drawings, and recordings online as Flash movies or PDF files.
Livescribe Dot Paper
Livescribe dot paper is regular paper printed with a unique pattern of tiny micro-dots. Livescribe’s unique patented dot-positioning system enables the Echo smartpen to precisely track everything it writes on paper. A variety of dot paper products, including college-sized notebooks, journals, and note pads, and you can also print your own dot paper using certified laser-jet printers.
What’s in the Box
The Echo smartpen with 4 GB of memory; Livescribe Desktop software for Mac or Windows (download); 500 MB of personal online storage; starter dot paper notebook; Micro USB Cable; interactive getting started guide; smartpen tips and tricks guide; 2 smartpen caps; 2 ink cartridges
The Echo smartpen works only with Livescribe Dot Paper.
System Requirements
- Windows XP with SP3 or Windows Vista or Windows 7
- Intel-based Mac with Mac OS X 10.5.5 or later, including 10.6
- 300 MB minimum free disk space
- USB 2.0 port
- Internet connection for software download
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Rating: 
(out of 19 reviews)
List Price: $ 169.95
Price: $ 156.99
Comments
Review by G. Ware Cornell Jr. for Livescribe 4 GB Echo Smartpen
Rating:
I am a great believer in Livescribe’s smartpens. The first offering three years ago Livescribe 2 GB Pulse Smartpen has worked perfectly ever since. It is not exactly svelte, but it had the capacity to record 200 hours of audio and has proved to be an extremely reliable and useful tool for a busy litigation practice.
The Echo is a refinement of the original Pulse. It is slimmer, and doesn’t quite look like one of those metal cigar containers. It has twice the memory of my original smartpen. The price has come down over the years significantly making an investment in a smartpen even more attractive.
I use my pen to record initial client interviews as well as depositions. I am able using the Livescribe Desktop software to export a recording to a CD and send it to a client to here. However the best feature is its “point and play” technology which allows me to listen selectively to a recording on my pen by touching a word in my notes. The audio immediately syncs to the part of the conversation and has a five second “skip back/skip forward” feature to account for slow writers like me. I can also listen later to my notes and add additional points of interest.
Audio fidelity is amazingly good. The pen has settings for different environments like lectures or office meetings. Even if you just use the default settings you will be pleased with the output.
Besides being thinner, the new Echo no longer requires a cradle, and attaches directly to a USB port on your Mac (that’s me) or PC.This eliminates one more gadget I need to lug around in my briefcase.
Livescribe’s special paper should not intimidate any prospective purchaser. First it is possible to print your own paper. Livescribe suggests that this requires a laser printer, but I have actually done it with an injet. You have to test in any event whether your printer is compatible which is how I learned some inkjet printers will work.
However users will find Livescribe notebooks to be very reasonably priced. I buy Livescribe ANA-00018 Single Lined 100 Page 5-8 Notebook – 4 Pack which makes the cost per notebook very comparable to ordinary spiral notebooks. Clearly Livescribe is refusing to adopt the model of printer manufacturers who make most of their money on supplies.
There are applications available for the Echo including a text recognition app that offers a 30 day free trial. However my handwriting is usually indecipherable to even myself so I have never tried it. However the idea is great.
In the universe of Livescribe pens this is probably the one which should command your most serious consideration. 4GB is an an enormous amount of data and recording. I have never come close to filling 2GBs although I do remove recording from the pen from time to time while maintaining the audio on my Livescribe Desktop.
Livescribe has perfected a product that, as a tool for lawyers, for students, for physicians, and salesmen, as well a host of others was nearly perfect.
Review by SanjeevP for Livescribe 4 GB Echo Smartpen
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Amazing! is the first reaction to this device. Here are the things it can do, and generally well.
1. Write like a regular pen.
2. Record voice or sound like any digital recorder.
3. Link the written notes to the recorded sound. So if tap on a written word it will play the sound recorded at the time that word was written.
4. Upload handwritten notes and voice to computer.
5. Share your written notes and audio (Pencasts).
The sound quality is fairly good. There are lot of add on apps available like games, language translation, piano etc. which I have not used so far. It comes with two fine black ink cartridges, no medium, and I wish there was one included. The writing was faint with fine tip and it was scratchy to write. So I had to order an extra pack of five Livescribe ARA-000007 4 Medium Blue and 1 Fine Red Ink Cartridge cartridges. Sometimes the writing is faint on the computer even with medium tipped blue cartridges.
PROBLEMS
1. BUGGY MAC LIVESCRIBE DESKTOP SOFTWARE: Echo pen does not come with any software, you have to download that from the web site. LiveScribe Desktop for Mac software is very sluggish and glitchy. You will be watching the spinning wheel for a while (3:48 minutes) when it starts, it will keep on asking you for email address and password and not let you use the program until you do. And if you are not connected to the Internet, the LiveScribe won’t stop spinning until you connect the Echo pen. Windows software is actually better, faster and does not hang up like that. After you connect the pen, it takes a while for the notes to show up. Although you can archive the notes from one pen to one computer, I have not yet figured out how to transfer notes to multiple computers because archiving the notes removes them from the pen. The first time I connected the pen, it updated the firmware automatically.
2. DIFFICULT TO PRINT CUSTOM PAPER: Another problem is that you have to buy notebooks and paper from LiveScribe. As far as I can make out, they do not sell A4 size paper. You can print the paper on some Postscript color laser printers. I could not print the paper on Dell 5100cn color laser printer, either with Dell Postscript driver or with Adobe generic Postscript driver but I was successful in printing the paper on Brother MFC-9840CDW Color Laser Multifunction Center with Wireless Interface and Duplex – but only from the Mac LiveScribe. It took a long time – 2 hours – to print 25 pages! Interestingly, the custom notebooks could be printed only in Mac Livescribe, not from the Windows version. The file was 200MB. You have to print one full notebook of 25 pages at time and you cannot print partial notebooks, say pages 1-10. And you can only print total 100 pages (4 Notebooks with 25 pages each). So if you want to use more than hundred pages, you have to archive a notebook before you can do that. That limits active pages to 100 at a time! This is the biggest drawback I found for my purpose because I need to have hundreds of active records at a time where I can write information on multiple days. The same limitation also applies to their notebooks.
3. POOR HANDWRITING RECOGNITION ADD ON MyScript: My main purpose in buying this pen was to convert handwritten notes to computer text. For that I had to buy a thirty buck add on called MyScript for LiveScribe which does not work so well. Even with clear cursive writing it does not recognize many words and has particular difficulty with technical words, so you have to add each word one by one into the dictionary, and cannot import your Microsoft Word or Pages dictionary. Very tedious process. But it has Auto Replacement, which works like Microsoft Word Autocorrect, e.g. if you write 3m, you can program it to expand to 3 months. That is the work around to poor handwriting recognition.
4. ANNOYING UNTETHERED CAP: Like every one else, I found the loose cap very irritating, it can be easily lost. Are you supposed to keep putting and removing the cap all day long? It is not clear to me why they couldn’t make a retractable pen or why the cap cannot be held in place on the back of the pen or tethered with a small cord. There is no clip on the pen to clip it to your pocket either.
5. NO AUTO ON & OFF: If you forget to turn the pen on by pressing the pen will not record anything. I cannot understand why the pen does not have auto on, it should turn on as soon as you start writing on the paper. May be they can fix this with a firmware upgrade.
Overall, it is great for students to record lectures, attorneys, journalists, conference attendees making notes etc. and you can later on refer to the written notes and /or speech. You can write or record speech or do both and link the two. Those who are going to record a lot of audio should go for 8 Gb; for most users 4 Gb should suffice. If you use LiveScribe notebooks and Windows software it works fairly well. For But if you have a Mac, need to print your own custom A4 paper, or need handwriting recognition, then it is a work in progress and needs lot of bugs fixed before it can become a mainstream product. May be they can have a wi-fi card like Eye-Fi so that notes are automatically transferred to your computer. It sure has the potentiel.
Review by Jason Rowley for Livescribe 4 GB Echo Smartpen
Rating:
I first saw one of these at Cisco Live in Vegas a few weeks ago. I thought it was nifty and then forgot all about it. Then, I saw a rash of blog posts praising the new Echo pens and had to try it.
I am terrible about writing this down in a regular notebook and then never looking at it again. Either that, or it takes forever for me to flip through hundreds of pages looking for something. I recently decided I needed to do something about that so I started using Evernote and Things to become more productive. Still, I was missing something.
When I first received the pen, I was one of the unlucky ones who had the dreaded “Upgrade the pen software” error when trying to use the included dot paper. I talked with support and found out that there was a firmware issue that affected some people. Drat. This didn’t seem to be off to a good start.
Fortunately, within a couple days, the new firmware was posted and I was able to get started. So far, no issues at all. I use Mac OS X and the software works great.
My only gripe is the lack of functionality to convert handwritten notes to text. You need to purchase a 3rd party application for that for an extra $30. If that feature was included, I would rate the pen 5 stars in a heartbeat.
Now that I have this, the rest falls on me to do the rest. So far, so good. Part of my post-meeting workflow now is to copy the images into Evernote and add my tasks to Things. So long abandoned papers!
UPDATE: Didn’t realize the notes to text software was included. Updated to a solid 5 stars
Review by K. Vijayraghavan for Livescribe 4 GB Echo Smartpen
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I’ve had the pen for about a week now and here is my impression of the great product!
Advantages:
1. Can keep track of where you are writing.
It can keep track of where you are writing and also which page you are writing over multiple notebooks without you have to do anything special. I frequently come back and correct something that I have previously written. The other products (DigiMemo and zpen) can’t keep track of this automatically and hence they would not have worked for me. The notebooks themselves are inexpensive. I just bought a 3 subject notebook with 300 sides for $8 and I am pretty sure it is going to last me at least a year.
2. Record while writing.
This is great for me since I sometimes discuss my research with other experts. I usually manage to remember all the major points, but having the ability to listen to the conversation again even after many months gives you the ability to listen to the same conversation with new perspectives and ideas.
3. Writing is searchable.
I am a grad student and I tend to write a lot of math equations and diagrams while doing my work and along with these equations I write a few sentences to describe my ideas behind those equations. Echo will allow me to have a searchable electronic copy of my written work since I tend to come back and look at these equations etc after many months. The handwriting recognition software which is in-built in Livescribe desktop only allows you to search. You can export the page image itself as a PDF, but if you also want it transcribed as text (using OCR software), you need to pay and get MyScript. Livescribe gives you a 30 day trial version only.
4. Can use from multiple computers.
I use about 2-3 computers all of which contain important research information. The livescribe desktop allows you to use your pen from multiple computers as long as you register the pen.
Disadvantages:
1. No Auto on.
This is not a big disadvantage per say, but if you forgot to turn your pen on it won’t record anything. I have lost a few pages this way, but I guess once you get used to it, this won’t be a problem.
2. Recording also records the scratching sound of pen on paper.
This doesn’t hinder your ability to hear the main conversation, but it would be nice to not have this problem.
Other Comments:
1. It is reasonably comfortable to hold, although having never used such a thick pen, I am still getting used to it. My hands tend to get tired easily with it. Hopefully these problems go away in due course of time.
2. I tried to print my own notepad from my office printer, but the print size was huge (200MB per page) and it would have taken a lot of time to print, so I jut went and bought the paper. It is possible that I wasn’t printing correctly.
3. If you read the “Rant and Raves” in the Livescribe forum, you’ll notice that a lot of people are very unhappy with the fact that you can’t delete individual pages easily from the desktop software. For some reason people seem to not like the desktop software too much. I find the software adequate for what it is supposed to do.
Overall, I would highly recommend this product!
Update: As mentioned in the comments for this review, single pages can be deleted as long as you have archived the notebook.
Review by Kirstin Crossland for Livescribe 4 GB Echo Smartpen
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I’ve had a Pulse for over a year and picked up the Echo yesterday. I think it is a great upgrade. The pen is still
a bit thick but it is comfortable to use and lightweight. I like the redesign that prevents it from rolling very much. I’ve had no issues – unlike previous reviewers – with firmware or with installing on different machines. I have it on my home MacBook Pro running OS X Snow Leopard and I have it on my work Dell laptop running XP Pro and the installation went smoothly and the performance has been flawless. I highly recommend this pen to anyone that asks about it!
My one and only caveat is the pen cap – which I like having – is a piece that could be lost easily. I wish there was a way to attach it to the Echo when removed from the tip to prevent loss but I realize it is up to me to keep track of it.
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