Livescribe 3 Smartpen for Android & iOS Tablets and Smartphones

# Livescribe 3 What seems like many years ago I acquired the first Livescribe smartpen, the Pulse. I was blown away. It not only seemed like ultimate tool for a trial lawyer, it was. Thus I reviewed the Pulse quite favorably in July 2008. When the Pulse was made Mac compatible, I modified my review and declared ""Relax and Join the Revolution." Two years later I found myself even more impressed when the second pen, the Echo, was released. My review was styled "Perfecting the Nearly Perfect". Along comes the Livescribe 3. It's hard to imagine that Livescribe could improve on the improved "nearly perfect", but they have. This is a revolutionary smartpen. A lot has changed in the world since 2008, but a Livescribe pen still records audio while you write. This feature enables you to simply touch a word in your notes to bring up what was being said when the note was written. This is, was, and remains the greatest reason to own a Livescribe pen. You do not need to listen to an entire recording to determine exactly what your note means. When I meet with clients for the first time, nine times out of ten I use my smartpen. The revolution in 2013 however is in the interface. The Livescribe 3 is designed for the post-PC world. The smartpen is paired with my iPad Air. My notes are instantly loaded into a Livescribe app and from there can be further exported into a vast array of other apps. This makes case organization much easier. The pen itself is lighter and more attractive. The Pulse looked like a blue cigar tube. The lighter Echo was designed with a great deal of flair, and the metal barrel was gone. It still had a cap for the ball point, and I have always been afraid I would lose it. The new pen has a retractable ball point totally eliminating the possibility of losing part of the pen. The overall design is worthy of a $100 plus pen. As always, special paper is required, but it is priced fairly and you can print your own paper. The pen uploads automatically to my iPad, but strangely not to the old Livescribe desktop. So the Livescribe 3 remains relevant , revolutionary, and still manages to be state of the art.

I bought the Livescribe pen having previously used the Echo and Sky Wifi pens. This is by far the most superior of the livescribe ranges because it uses the bluetooth to transfer the notes and the audio. I use the pen in lectures and for the most part it is a very effective piece of kit. Not having the microphone in the pen reduces the sound of the pen scratching. Although my recording device is usually beside me in the lecture hall I can still hear a faint scribbling on playback. The software supporting the pen could do with much improvement. The app is slightly temperamental and can crash. If this happens generally any audio being record at the time will be lost. You can sync multiple books which is good because this allows easy organization of notes The software playback of audio is very good and unlike the Sky Wifi there is no buffer time and you can skip easier between pages and notebooks. Having a wifi connection may seem attractive but relying on the cloud to do everything instead of having it more local on your device can be frustrating when trying to review work. I think that there should be a Livescribe 3 version of the Livescribe Desktop that is used by the Echo pen. I was advised by a Livescribe CS Agent that when the app is deleted or reinstalled the audio is lost which is a big downside. There should be someway of actually backing up the audio. I only use ios devices therefore no android support has little impact on me. Overall this is an investment that is well worth it because it will enhance note taking and means once you sync you really don’t need the book to see your notes because everything is stored digitally which is a big plus.

I was going to walkway from LiveScribe this year. I have been a long term user. I had the Pulse, Echo, and the horrible pen called the Sky. The Sky broke my spirit for this company. The product was an excellent idea, but since it's inception there have been minimal improvements to make the ecosystem work between Evernote and the Pen. I could have worked with the right improvements. QUICKLY, but it didn't. I was so frustrated at the lack of OCR, and Pencasts that I had been used to for years I nearly threw the sky out of the window. Low and behold the reason the sky wasn't improved upon is because they had this up their sleeves. I have only used the pen for one day and I will update this review as things progress, but my initial reactions from using this L3 is they finally got one step closer to making the perfect product. This pen feels more solid, writes smoother, works leaps and bounds better than the Sky, and best of all, OCR and Pencasts are BACK! Is this pen as easy as they say on the site? Yes it is. You just download the application on your iPhone or iPad, turn Bluetooth on, turn the pen on with the application running and if instantly pairs to your device. Pick up the paper and start writing and the notes start showing up right on your device with a 3 second delay. I was really blown away with how easy it was. No account setup, no Evernote connection, no computer, just your iPhone and this pen and the LiveScribe paper pad. Once the light turns blue on your pen you are ready to write. As long as the light is blue the on is connected to your device and you can continue to write notes while the phone is in sleep mode provided it does not auto lock. You can multitask on your phone and the app continuously tracks your pen in the background. Fire off the LiveScribe app and all of your text is right there! It's pretty neat. This pen has no internal storage, so if you don't have your iDevice it will not work. Since I am NEVER without my iPad or iPhone at work, this is no problem for me. Can this ecosystem be improved? Yes! There is no way currently that you can link your old LiveScribe account to this new device, there's no way to directly sync to Evernote anymore, there's no way to sync your data offline or off of your idevice yet, there is no way to stop the app from using your data to upload the files to their servers for OCR recognition. Based on Livescribes history of improvements with the Sky, I wouldn't hold your breath on getting those options any time soon, but you can export notes as PDFs to share with others, you can add photos and pictures to notes now. You can transcribe notes to text, do PenCasts, upload to Evernote as a PDF with embedded audio, a lot of stuff that old school LiveScribe owners grew to love is all back. I think this pen is a massive improvement over the prior Sky Pen. If LiveScribe stays the course and makes quick improvements to address customers needs they will have a winning product here. The jury is really still out as I get more seat time with this device. I will update this review as I discover more down the road.

Funciona como en el video que revise, piensa uno en manuscrito y después no hay que capturar. Me encanta y no es tan costosa como Moleskine.

Der Livescribe PEN 3 ist mein dritter Stift von der Firma Livescribe. Ich habe mich entschlossen den PEN3 zu kaufen, weil ich eine noch einfachere Bedienung und Weiterverarbeitung der Notizen haben wollte. Mit der iphone- und ipad-APP werden die Aufzeichnungen die man auf dem Livescribe Papier macht, sofort auf Iphone/Ipad übertragen. Bis zu 5 mobile Geräte lassen sich mit einem Stift koppeln. Was mir am PEN 3 hinsichtlich Audio-Aufzeichnung gefällt ist die Tatsache, dass nicht mehr ein eingebautes Mikro im Stift die Schreibgeräusche mit aufzeichnet, sondern das Mikro von Iphone/Ipad verwendet wird. Notizen und Ton werden perfekt synchronisiert und können als Pencast an z.B. Evernote versendet werden. PDFs der Aufschriebe könne sofort via eMail versendet werden. Die Software der Apps ist gut gelungen. Die Feed Funktion wandelt Handschrift in Computer-Text um. Endlich kann man unterschiedliche Livescribe Hefte, Notizblöcke etc. gleichzeitig nutzen und mit dem PEN3 ohne umständliches aktivieren beschreiben. Sehr schön ist nun das edle Design des Stiftes. Er liegt sehr gut in der Hand und wirft fragende Blicke auf. Ich denke Livescribe ist da wieder ein guter Wurf gelungen und bleibe bei dieser Technologie. Bitte achtet darauf, dass Ihr beim Start immer das PEN3 Instruction Paper dabei habt. Nur damit könnt ihr über das Symbol auf dem Spezialpapier das Iphone / Ipad initial koppeln.

As promised I have come back to update my original review. The product is now excellent, and I have been using it every day in meetings since version 1.0.6 of the app was updated on my iPad. The recording functionality now works, and it has not crashed. I would now recommend the product without hesitation, and have updated my review from 2 to 5 stars. Of course I would still like the automatic Evernote integration option, a desktop application and cloud sync between them all, but one step at a time !! Thanks Livescribe. Original Review below _____________________________ I love my livescribe pens, let me say that first. This is my 3rd, however this product is not mature enough to be released to the market. I had to return one pen because the force sensing relay (i.e. the bit that detects that the pen is on the page) was stuck on, resulting in unintelligible scrawl. The replacement pen works well, but the app needs to be debugged. I have it paired with my iPad and my iPhone, and although it should deliver the written pages to both apps according to the documentation it is just random, and has now actually stopped delivering data to the iPhone. Don't rely on it for Audio, as the app WILL crash if you attempt to record audio and write notes (the main reason for having the pen). I am currently back to my Wifi smart pen to record audio and text at the same time. I was attracted to this pen to get the OCR, which actually does work well, but what I am disappointed in is the removal of close integration with Evernote which you now have to create a PDF and send it to Evernote rather than it just doing it. Howvere it does remove the niggle that I had with the Wifi pen which you cannot view easily offline. At least now I can do that on my iPad. In short, I believe that the product was rushed out to market with poor quality on both the software and hardware I cannot rely on it for my work as it stands right now. I hope that the software will be fixed soon, and if Livescribe merge the features of the Echo, Wifi and the 3 then it will be the perfect pen and application suite. I will come back and give it more stars if the software is improved however right now I am being generous with 2 stars.

funciona muy bien, en todas las condiciones, casi de forma mágica transfiere de una libreta tus anotaciones a un dispositivo electrónico

La penna funziona bene, hanno eliminato il problema del clic rumoroso quando si inizia a scrivere che avevo letto in altre recensioni ed ora è silenziosissima. Il software funziona abbastanza bene e sinceramente non trovo difetti evidenti di cui lamentarmi. Ovviamente ero ben consapevole delle sue caratteristiche, profondamente diverse dalla echo 4gb che possiedo e che ha il triste difetto che dopo un anno o due il display si smorza fino a spegnersi. (Altrimenti sarebbe quasi perfetta). Accettando il fatto che per registrare la voce si deve utilizzare lo smartphone o l'ipad il sistema funziona bene. Per me è una comodità enorme il fatto che il suo software possa trasferire in automatico su Onenote i miei appunti.