Livescribe Echo Smartpen review

Dot paper is available in various forms and types. Our 2GB pen came with several individual test sheets of plain, lined and squared paper, while higher-capacity versions come with a dot paper book. More paper isn’t particularly expensive: four 80-page books cost around £15 and you can also print your own. To do this, you need a colour laser printer that supports Adobe PostScript. It’s not an uncommon specification, but printers of this sort tend to be fairly expensive.

Regardless of whether you print your paper or buy it, you’ll need to use the Livescribe Desktop software to transfer the pages and audio recordings from your pen to your PC. It’s clear and easy to use, providing a simple library that groups together every page from the same book and links each audio recording with the page you were working on when you recorded it. If you associate multiple recordings with the same page, you can play each of them by clicking on what you wrote as they were recorded. The same applies to different parts of a longer recording so if, for example, you take notes while recording a lecture lasting one hour, clicking on the notes you made half an hour in will start the recording playing from exactly that point. You can also view a list of recordings sorted by time and date.

As well as making it easy to access your notes, Livescribe Desktop provides a convenient interface to your online storage, where you can upload pages as Pencasts. If both audio and writing is associated with a Pencast, it’ll be played as a video that shows what you’ve written or drawn in real time as any associated audio recordings are played. Pages with only writing appear as still images. You can download your files as PDFs, make them public, or invite chosen users to access them.

The Livescribe website also provides access to an app store, where you can download a range of free and paid-for apps to install on your pen. This includes a free copy of legendary text adventure Zork, which uses built-in handwriting recognition to let you write commands in response to text displayed on the pen’s tiny OLED screen. You can also buy a range of other games and applications, ranging from measuring tools to offline Wikipedia references.

Despite the pen being able to work out what you’re writing in a text adventure, the Livescribe Desktop software can’t carry out handwriting recognition on its own. Instead, you can buy a customised version of the MyScript handwriting recognition software for $30 (about £19). It’s worth having, and even deciphered our cursive scrawl with a fair degree of accuracy. Other paid-for options include LiveScribe Connect Premium for £10 (free with higher capacity Echo pens), which adds email and Google Docs integration.

With a wealth of features and an elegant interface, the Echo is nothing short of brilliant. We’d have preferred not to have to buy handwriting recognition software separately and we’d like to be able to use a greater range of printers to make our own dot paper, but every aspect of the pen’s core functionality is outstanding. At just under £100, this 2GB version is well worth the money, and has enough room for well over a hundred hours of audio if you don’t go overboard with apps.