Have to say I love this pen. Not saying there aren’t any drawbacks. There are and we’ll get to that in a minute. Overall, the pen is a dream. The audio recording can be of surprisingly good quality. Of course the environment has a lot to do with it but generally for small rooms it has been great – maybe better if I used the headphones which records what you actually hear, I haven’t had much chance to use that nor use it in a large room. Most of the time I use it without the audio recording. That way, it only records my writing which was the only reason I wanted it – to be able to search my notes.

I also wanted to use it as a tool to convert handwriting to text and did extensive research on this point before purchasing. That part was super important to me. At first, I was rather discouraged to find out this was not a built in feature but it is possible because for an extra $30, you can purchase MyScript which is a plugin to do just that. I purchased this in store at Target and really lucked out because the box had an activation code in it free. It was for a limited time only unfortunately, so when my husband purchased his, it didn’t have the free license.

The text converter works pretty well. I use it write blog posts which is awesome. A totally liberating experience because that means I am no longer chained to any computer desktop or laptop and carrying a pen beats carrying a laptop or a netbook.

I also like the ability to do pencasts – this means, writing out a mindmap or checklist (or just about anything) while talking out loud – so it becomes a type of whiteboard. You can upload the pencasts to Livescribe.com, make it public or invite selected people to view the video. This is a great way to illustrate ideas with your team members or even teach people something new.

Annoyances

Like I said, the pen has its share of annoyances. Actually not the pen itself but the desktop software that makes the rest of it work can be a real let down. A few things that disappoint me are:

Organizing your notes. You have to make a little mindset shift in how you use your notebooks. Everything is organized by notebook and you cannot organize the pages within each notebook as you like. So let’s say you wrote about email marketing ideas in pages 43 and 13 . You cannot group pages 43 and 13 together. The good news is, there is a search feature and through the user forum, I learned how to categorize these related pages by tagging them. On top of every page, I make sure I write tags on them e.g. email marketing, ideas so now, when I search for email marketing, I’ll get a list of all pages where that keyword appears. You can make more specific codes of course that way your search becomes more accurate and you can search through the notes faster.

No Page deletion. You read that right. Once you write on a page, you cannot delete it on your computer. I guess it make sense in some ways because technically, once you write on that piece of paper it is used up. On printed notebooks, this is consistent with the way physical notebooks are used. But on printable notebooks where you can replace a page where you messed up physically, it is not possible on the software. If you print a page, use it, then trash it and reprint the page and write on the page again, you’ll end up with overlapping text on the same page. There is no work around on this yet at time of writing. While this is perfect for recording every word you write, you might want to be careful about what you write with the pen because at this point, it is literally permanent ;-). You can trash the whole notebook of course but who wants to do that?

Sharing pencasts outside of Livescribe.com community web site. As of right now, this is still not possible. Yes, you can absolutely share the videos with the general public, but you cannot host the pencasts on your own. A work around is to record the pencast with your screen capture software like Camtasia or Jing, but you will lose some of the nifty features of the pencasts. It is not a deal breaker for me.

Overall, there are many bits and pieces of plusses here and there that make giving up this pen a little difficult for me. One of the things that’s nice is, I can write down my brainstorm and thoughts on this so on it’s own it is a great resource for my own business – something to look back upon and see my mistakes or an idea I may have forgotten. On a personal note, I’ve also started using the pen to write a diary to pass on to my children. That’s going to be interesting.