Livescribe Echo Smartpen 8GB review

The pen is one of the oldest bits of technology on the planet. Although it has been refined throughout the ages, the basic concept has remained unchanged. Whether it's a stylus writing on clay, quill on parchment, a fountain pen or a biro, you use a tool to make an essentially permanent impression that can't easily be manipulated or duplicated afterwards. Although it's now possible to extend the reach of the inked word by photocopying or scanning, manipulating ink on paper is still more difficult than it would be on a computer.

Written text typed on a computer can be easily manipulated and distributed. However, not everyone finds typing comfortable and many are quicker at writing by hand than they are at typing.

Arguably, the Livescribe Echo Smartpen gives you the best of both worlds. It's an electronic pen that captures your handwriting as you write and transfers it to your computer. It therefore combines the convenience and portability of a pen with the flexibility of typed text.

Captured handwriting is stored on the Echo's 8GB of internal memory. It's then transferred to your PC via a USB cable. The Echo not only saves what you write, it can also recognise and save drawings. Thanks to its built-in mic it can also record what people around you are saying as you write. This data can also be transferred to a computer.

The potential here is great. For example, you can use the Echo to not only make notes during a business meeting or a lecture, but record what's being said as you write. This allows the nuances of speech, often lost in a written transcription, to be captured. LiveScribe calls these voice-annotated documents Pencasts which can be saved and shared as Flash movies.

Data from the pen is stored, reviewed and shared using the Livescribe Desktop software. The upload process starts automatically when the Echo is plugged into a USB port. Pencasts can be saved or exported to PDF.

However, if you want to turn your written words into typed, editable text, you need to augment Livescribe Desktop with the MyScript optical character recoginition (OCR) program, which costs an extra US$30 to download. Given the already non-trivial cost of the Echo, this should really be included in the box.

In practice it all works smoothly, but there are several constraints. The pen itself is larger than the average writing instrument making it somewhat unwieldy to hold and write with. Although it is smaller than its predecessor, the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, it's still a bit too big to carry around in a pocket.

Obviously, if you want a comprehensive record of your writings you will have to remember to use the Echo constantly, for everything you write. You’ll need to be sure its internal battery is kept charged and, most restrictively, you’ll have to write on special paper.

An A5 sized 50 sheet book of this special paper is included with the Echo. There is a network of tiny dots on each sheet that make the paper look grey, and it is these that enable the pen to record what you write. The pen's tiny infrared camera captures pen movement over these dots at a rate of more than 70 images a second. You therefore can’t write on ordinary paper and expect to have your writing recorded.

The paper also has some tappable controls along its bottom edge which allow you to access the pen's special features. You can use these controls to play back audio for example. There’s a 3.5mm headphones jack on the top of the pen so you can listen in private – though the pen also has a loudspeaker built in.