By Livia Bergovoy

This pen has a learning curve. At first we thought it was too steep, but soon – within the day – we were continually drawn (no pun intended) back to it.  We kept coming up with reasons to use it.  Turns out the Echo Smartpen has marvelous utility.

This pen has a learning curve. At first we thought it was too steep, but soon – within the day – we were continually drawn (no pun intended) back to it.  We kept coming up with reasons to use it.  Turns out the Echo Smartpen has marvelous utility.
Let’s get the negatives out of the way:The pen has a cover for the tip but is not attached or attachable to the pen and therefore too easy to lose. (We can see an accessory on the horizon…)A too-gentle tap of the on/off button at the top of the pen can inadvertently end a recording session. This is a serious issue as you can unwittingly miss recording parts of lectures, etc.Now that those are out of the way… As we said we continue to look forward to testing the Echo Smartpen for this review. For that matter, this review is gleaned from recordings we’ve made and notes we’ve taken with the aptly named Echo.
The Smartpen is great for students at lectures and for professionals at meetings, even for recording journal entries, or on the fly brainstorming to be transcribed later. All you have to do is begin a recording session by tapping  “record” on the “dot” paper. A pad of about 50 sheets of special dot paper comes with the pen and if you have access to a color laser printer you can print more dot paper. You can buy additional pads at the Livescribe Website. That’s where you’d buy additional pen tips too. And, no surprise, there are apps – from games to travel phrases in various languages to functional applications. Our next review will cover the transcription software that automatically turns your handwriting into text.  It took some experimentation, but we did discover how to add written notes to sync with recordings made at an earlier time. It is really quite a time saver to tap on a key word and hear that part of the recording. We even jotted down phrases to tap where we wanted to skip parts of long presentations. For example, we were at an lunch-hour presentation and as is wont to happen there was a technical glitch which took 15 minutes for the presenters to resolve. So we jotted “tech glitch here” and “tech glitch end.” Now we could listen to the goings on during the attempts to resolve said tech glitch, or jump to the end by tapping “tech glitch end.” And by the way, the audio quality is excellent. We recorded a conference where the pen was in our purse hanging on the back of the chair and the speaking parts of the session were clear and crisp. Ambient noise was barely noticeable.
The Echo Smartpen interacts with the Livescribe Desktop application. As instructed, we downloaded and installed the software – in this case – onto our Win7 notebook. This is where the recordings and notes are stored and manipulated to become PDFs and so on.
Once the software is installed, recordings and the notes are automatically copied to the Livescribe Desktop software when you plug the USB cable into the PC. This was a bit disconcerting; we wished we could have been given the choice for recharging or uploading the flash contents in the Smartpen.  Having said that, the desktop software is quite intuitive so it is simple and quick to delete any of the items from the pen and or desktop.  The Echo smartpen does not come with an AC adapter for recharging the battery so it can needs to be connected the USB port.
Hey, can it be that our next book will be transcribed from the Echo?  Why not! The pen we are reviewing has an eight gig flash card built in. That’s more than enough for an epic such as Atlas Shrugged.