Review: LiveScribe's Sky wifi smartpen – a clever bridge between paper and tablet

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Evernote can search for text strings in your handwritten notes: scary stuff

The LiveScribe Sky Wifi smartpen

From notepad to tablet in one quick sync

The digitization is excellent. Green areas like my beautiful self-portrait here indicate that you can playback audio by tapping on them

The LiveScribe Sky Wifi smartpen

Instead of physical buttons, you use printed buttons in the notebook to control settings on the smartpen

Close-up view of the Anoto smart paper – the patterns formed by these tiny dots identify each page as unique, and also plot out the entire area of each page for writing on

The LiveScribe Sky Wifi smartpen's setup page

The back of the notepad has a scientific calculator app built in: neat!

Article Summary

This is one of the coolest toys I've played with in years. LiveScribe's smartpens have the ability to instantly digitize anything you write in a notebook and send it to a tablet or PC as a handwritten note. But here's the cool part: they can also record the sound you were hearing when you wrote those notes, timecoded to each penstroke, so, for example, you can tap on a lecture note and hear exactly what the professor was saying when you were writing it. The latest LiveScribe pen, the Sky Wifi, has built-in wireless connectivity that quickly syncs your notes, audio and all, with the ubiquitous Evernote application so you can read and play them back on your PC, tablet or smartphone. It's a fascinating device that revolutionizes the taking, usage and sharing of handwritten notes. We spent ten days with a LiveScribe Sky 4 GB.

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