Livescribe 2GB Pulse Smartpen (APA-00002)

Yes, the Livescribe Smart Pen can do a lot of amazing
things. It also has some serious problems.

Out of the box, it did not work. Got an error message.
The startup instructions says, first make sure it works,
then put it in the cradle and check for firmware
updates. I had to update the firmware first, and then
it started to work.

The first two sessions I recorded in the pen worked fine.

Then, I recorded about 14 hours of classroom lectures
over four sessions. I could listen to the lectures by
plugging earphones into the pen. When I tried to
transfer the recordings to the PC, the transfer failed.
After that, I could not restart the transfer. Called
customer support. Tried to do a few things to reset the
pen. In the end, the only solution was to do a complete
firmware reset. This meant I lost the entire 14 hours
of recordings. For this I do not need to own a $200.00
Smartpen.

(I usually avoid early-adopter and stick to tried-and-
true. This time I violated that philosophy, because the
concept sounded so cool. I now wish I had waited for
version 3, as I usually do.)

To extend the warrantee from 90 days to one year, you
must register. If you do not register, it will nag you
incessantly. No respect for someone who prefers not to
register. Then when I did try to register, I could not
find the "Submit" button on the registration page and
registration failed.

The PC software, "Livescribe Desktop," does not let you
save your sessions in folders of your own choosing with
filenames of your own choosing. It throws everything
into the "My Documents" folder. You cannot organize the
sessions into subfolders. (All other applications I
know allows separate filenames but assigns its own
default extension. E.g. the ".DOC" extension for MS-Word
or ".PDF" extension for Adobe Acrobat. I like that way
better.)

No way to save the audio to an MP3 file to give it to
someone without a pen. You can share sessions only
through the Livescribe web site. This does not work if
you want to give the audio to someone without a web
connection. Cannot listen to recordings with your
mp3-player/ipod.

The PC software requires XP or Vista. Forget it if
you only have a mere Windows 2000 machine.

It would be nice is there were an attached islet, both
on the pen and on the carrying case. Then one could
attach a string to prevent losing it.

The desktop application proudly announces that it uses
Java. That is why it executes so slowly. (Java is
easier on the programmers and takes 4 times as long to
execute versus C++.)

One positive point about this mess. Call customer
support and you can talk to a live person in only a few
phone-menus. And the support people are knowledgeable.
The bad news is the fact that you must call customer
support in the first place. The bad news number 2 is,
send an email to custormer support and it takes a few
days to get a reply. Or you may never get a reply. Do
not even get an automatic confirmation that the email
was received.

When I run the desktop manager on my windows vista 64 bits don't recognized the pen, and don't let my transfer the information from the pen to the laptop.

I made a test on windows xp and work's ok, but on my vista 64 bits doesn't work.

What can I do to fix this situation?

Google "Unable to access your database folders" for a serious problem with this pen, or rather with the PC software used to search your notes.

So you already know the pen is wonderful, amazing, fantastic and does so much. Clearly created by fanatical geniuses. Unfortunately the desktop software is not quite there yet. In my opinion, the biggest flaw is that you can't group your pages together into binders or folders. I have a 200 page notebook with sessions weekly from business meetings, classes, lectures and interviews. If I wanted to have a folder labeled "candidate interviews" and move all my pages into that folder, I can't. This is a serious flaw. There's no indexing system for your work. So if you have hundreds of pages on your desktop you cannot tag them, index them, group them or associate them together in any way. Clearly 1/2 done.

The other missing functionality is character recognition and translation to text. This would have been a killer feature if it were included but it doesn't seem to be here and it's certainly not integrated.

Wouldn't it be nice if those two things were part of this software?

Finally, someone else asked for this too, why isn't there a clip on the side of the pen for two reasons; one so it doesn't roll and two so it can be clipped to the inside of my shirt pocket!

So don't let that stop you from getting this amazing device but don't expect to get these functions in the provided software.

I got this for work. I take lots of notes. This thing is awesome. Lots of people at work are getting them - it's really catching on.

All I can say is that it does everthing as advertised. You do have to write in their special notebooks, however, that's not such a bad thing, since the books come in different types, plus the books have calculator sheets as well.

In a pinch, you can print your own special paper with a high-resolution printer.