Best Buy Livescribe
Livescribe 2GB Echo Smartpen
- Record everything you write and hear so you'll never miss a word
- Replay your meetings or lectures simply by tapping on your notes
- Saves notes and audio recordings to your computer
- Search for words within your notes
- Send notes and audio from your paper to destinations like Facebook, Evernote, and Microsoft OneNote
List Price: $ 119.99
Discount Price: $ 119.99
Take the stress out of tests and meetings with an Echo smartpen from Livescribe. Record everything you hear, say and write, while linking your audio recordings to your notes. Quickly replay audio from your Livescribe paper, a computer, or a mobile device - all with a simple tap on your handwritten notes. It's never been easier to take notes and stay organized.
Customer Reviews
| 762 of 812 people found the following review helpful  Perfecting the nearly perfect, By This review is from: Livescribe 4 GB Echo Smartpen (Personal Computers) 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. 0 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 t o hear. 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 p rinter, 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 even to me so I have never tried it. However the idea is great. In the universe of Livescribe pens this is probably th e 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. 673 of 725 people found the following review helpful  Works Well on Windows; Mac Software Sluggish & Handwriting Recognition Add On MyScript Does Not Work Well, By This review is from: Livescribe 4 GB Echo Smartpen (Personal Computers) 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 except MyScript, which does not work very well. 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, there is no way to transfer notes to multiple compute rs 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. Despite using 1200 dpi resolution for printing, the quality of writing was still poor when it showed up on the computer. So I ended up using Livescribe Single Subject Spiral Notebook ANA-00017, 4-Pack, Nos. 1-4 which have A4 size paper, but p unched. 3. NO EASY WAY TO BACKUP: The data transferred to the computer is saved in one of those obscure and hidden Windows & Mac folders that are hard to find for non techies and will not back up unless you do global backup like Windows Backup or Mac Time Machine. You cannot save your data in custom folders. Even though, I had everything backed up, I could not restore the the data when my hard drive died and lost all archived notes. Three technical support reps from LiveScribe could not restore it. First two said they will call back and let me know but never did. The last technical support rep did get back to me in Email and said they could not restore my backed up data. After losing lot of data (300 A4 pages), I now save all notes as PDF files in my custom data folders and also upload to Evernote. I do not record lot of audio and so far the free Evernote account has been sufficient. Integration of Windows LiveScribe with Evernote works well. 4. POOR HA NDWRITING RECOGNITION ADD ON MyScript: My main purpose in buying this pen was to convert handwritten... Read more 79 of 86 people found the following review helpful  Sky is NOT an upgrade to Echo. It is a different product., Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: Livescribe 2GB Sky Wi-Fi Smartpen (Personal Computers) For everybody who is considering ordering this as an upgrade to their Echo or Pulse... do not do it! It is not the same product and it is definitely not an upgrade! I will explain below. 0 I have been a loyal LiveScribe customer since the first one came out. I have bought several notebooks and I thoroughly enjoyed both the Pulse and the Echo despite each of their problems. I picked up the LiveScribe Sky pen as soon as I could afford it, days after it came out. So I overnight the order from Amazon. Once I get home the instructions tell me that is not compatible with my desktop software that I've been using for myself, my business, and my clients for several years. No, this pen will only sync with Evernote! Absolutely utterly baffled I contact support and they tell me that the only option is to sync with Evernote. They tell me that they are thinking about making it available for the LiveScribe desktop software but they could not give any ETA at all. I end the call and get a ticket reference number in email. So now I tried to sync my pen and read it in Evernote. But, the sync with Evernote does not work. Every time I write on a page it creates a duplicate notebook in Evernote that is empty. You would think that while I talked with support the first time they would tell me about the problems with Evernote. But they do not. I call in again and this time the LiveScribe support rep says the "Evernote servers are down." I know this is not true as I just logged into Evernote a few moments before I called them. He tells me that syncing with Evernote is not an option for now. I hang up the phone and moments later get an email saying my ticket has been updated. After bit more research online it seems that people have been having problems syncing with Evernote for several days which makes this device no more useful than a fat normal pen. So in essence the only syncing feature of thi s pen does not work. The inside of the notebook that comes with it shows both Facebook and Google drive but it does not work with either of them and the pen simply says "coming soon" if you can click on those icons. None of the connectors that you set up with your old pens will be there because this pen is not compatible with those connectors and the desktop software. Finally after talking to Web chat support the chat window tries to redirect you to another webpage. This webpage is not available. Similarly after you try to install the software that they want you to install the final step is opening a webpage. Again this webpage is not available. It winds up sending you to a page called missing.html To summarize this product is not an upgrade from the old pen. Amazon should not list it as it does as if it is a newer version of Echo. This is an entirely new product that requires you to download a firmware update on day 1, can't sync with desktop LiveScrib e software and also cannot sync with Evernote. This product should not have been released. The quality assurance checks from LiveScribe are obviously missing. It is essentially a fat, useless desk pen that costs too much. |
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