Digitally record your handwritten notes, complete with audio
Microsoft’s One Note application might not get the same publicity as its Office suite, but it’s certainly not without its uses.
Perhaps its best feature is the ability to record meetings while you take down notes, either on the keyboard or using a stylus on a touchscreen tablet. It then synchronises the recorded audio with your notes, allowing you to quickly navigate to sections of the recording simply by selecting the relevant text.
You’d think that this would make One Note a must-have for students, lawyers, writers and anyone else who has to take notes. But it is let down by ergonomics. Laptop microphones are not well configured for the task, touchscreens have yet to get a comfortable writing surface, and typing can be too noisy for meetings. In short, One Note awaits the right hardware.
Enter Livescribe, with its listening smartpens. These do not use One Note but they do offer the same basic trick, packaged in a pen that digitally captures anything that it writes.
The Echo is the latest in Livescribe’s range, which uses specially patterned paper developed by the Swedish company Anoto to allow a smartpen to position itself on a page. The pattern is so faint that the page looks white at first glance.
You can create your own Anoto stationery if you have a colour laser capable of printing at 600dpi.
Design The pen is slightly too large for comfort but it can be used as an ordinary ballpoint. A removable cap protects the nib and a tiny infra-red camera that reads the page. The cap does not fit at the other end of the pen, so it is likely to get lost, but you are given a spare.
The lower portion of the pen is rubberised for easy gripping. Above this is a tiny microphone and speaker, pointing outwards when held in the writing position, plus a small one-line OLED mono display and an on-off switch.
At the blunt end is a micro-USB connector used for charging and linking to a computer, plus a jack that can take either headphones or a stereo combination earbud headphones and microphone that Livescribe offers as a £27.30 option.
