Juixe Techknow

When the iPhone first came out in the summer of 2007, I knew to wait at a minimum six months so as to give Apple enough time to work out all the kinks in the phone’s firmware. My wait paid of, especially since during that time the price of the iPhone dropped significantly. When the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen became widely available, I told myself that I would again wait at a minimum six months for all the kinks to be worked out, especially since I had never before heard of Livescribe. Unfortunately, when I saw a live demo at Target I broke down and shelled out for a 2GB Pulse on the spot. The Pulse lets you record the sounds and background noise around you as you jot notes down. What makes the Pulse so interesting is that you can play back the recording simply by clicking on the notebook where you had written. The pen will playback the audio recorded near the time when you wrote the area that you tapped. The Pulse integrates and plays back the written word with the spoken word.

The Pulse smartpen is aware of what you write. For example, you can draw a piano and but tapping the keys play the piano you drew. After seeing this, I immediately wanted to draw a rock band.

In the small slim package, the Livescribe Pulse hardware combines a ballpoint pen, infrared camera, speakers, LCD display, audio jacks to review your recorded sessions in private, and either 1GB or 2GB of internal storage space. The Pulse smartpen is programmable; there is a Software Developer Kit for the Java programming language.

The pen is considerably thicker than a conventional pen or pencil but comfortable enough to write for a long period of time. I’ve used the pen continuously for over an hour and had no discomfort of any sort. I found the digital copy of your writings to be faithful and accurate to the notebook. The smartpen is as easy to operate as a typical pen, once you learn how to turn it on and start a recording session. The pulse comes with proprietary dot paper notebook. As the name indicates, the dot paper has tiny little dots which the pulse’s infrared camera uses to record your writing. The Pulse also comes with a USB dock to connect the pen to your desktop and upload all recorded sound and images.

As is the case with most hardware products I’ve used, the software is what hold the Pulse back. The Livescribe Desktop is blatantly lacking key features and functionality.

The worst offense is that you can not do anything interesting with your drawings or writings without first registering and uploading your work to their site. You can’t export either the sound as an MP3 file, the image of a session as a vector image, or both image and sound as a movie. You can’t even save the files for each session to a different directory for backup or transfer. It is not obvious where the files are stored so you can’t just backup that directory or send a single file to a coworker. The Livescribe Pulse smartpen tries to replace the pen, paper, scanner, voice recorder but it actually just removes your freedom and replaces it with hard to use software.

The Livescribe Desktop is just not feature complete. For example, once you have your images loaded into your desktop you can remove them, one at a time. You can’t remove a page or a batch of sessions; you can only remove one session at a time. I also found it difficult to navigate through the list of sessions as they are automatically give the date and time as a name and not the page number. I consider date time as metadata so a much better naming conventions should be the notebook name with page number.

Ultimately I would like the ability to export any part of the session, the sound, image, and animation in a variety of open and standard formats such as MP3, PNG, and/or MPEG-4. This basic feature, freedom, is required if the Livescribe Pulse smartpen is to be functional in the office. I cannot use the Pulse smartpen for meetings at the office because we are not about to upload proprietary information, notes, and conversations to a third party website. As a technologist, I demand control of my data for my repurposing, such as hosting on the server and service of my choosing and embedding in my site.

Another omission from the Livescribe Desktop was OCR (Optical Character Recognition) support. I was not able to find any help, tutorials, or documentation on how to convert my hand written notes into text. I know that some scanner come with some level of OCR support and I expected the Pulse to have support out of the box.

The only ‘export’ functionality is the ability to copy the content of a page to the clipboard and sending a page to the printer.

Overall, the Livescribe Pulse smartpen is a interesting gadget. It is classroom ready but not necessary business ready. The design of the pen is slick, functional, and fun but the Livescribe Desktop software is neither. Key features missing from the desktop software are the ability to export to a wide variety of open and standard formats. Personally, I am apprehensive about creating content with a restricted tool and proprietary format. The Livescribe Pulse smartpen is just smart enough and will only be a toy and not a creative tool or business necessity. The Pulse will only be of value to me if I am to choose the format and platform in which I can share my sessions.

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