LiveScribe Pulse SmartPen

LiveScribe was released about a year ago, the new digital pen which has the possibilities to simultaneously record sound and handwriting in a special notebook – first of all, for students. About a month ago I looked at it and thought it was loveable – because of the design (elegancy), sleekness, light weight and the possibility of simultaneous recording and writing (I’ll explain later) and writing its own applications in JAVA like a pen. The offical website, the internet shop Amazon, Target and similar don’t delivery to Croatia, so I had to order it from Ebay. I ordered it from a user who has many positive feedbacks and mostly sells only LiveScribe Pulse SmartPens. After about two and a half weeks, it came to me at my address with the paper for toll, which I paid and had it in my hand :) Total price was about ~$240 – $160 the pen, $35 post costs and $40 the toll.

The box in which it comes looks like this (there is 1GB version and 2GB – I bought the cheaper one – 1GB version):

In the box you’ll find next:

• Pulse SmartPen with 1GB of memory – the pen itself



• 3-D Recording Headset – headphones which have microphones on them
• 3 tint cartridges + 1 stylus | correction by Robert
• band and for carrying around (like the ones on the mobile phones)



• notebook with 100 sheets (200 “pages“) with dot pattern



• USB battery charger (which is simultaneously a dock for transferring data to/from the computer)



• protection bag for the pen made from fabric/rubber



• DEMO card (practically, it’s not so user-friendly) and interactive stickers – for example calculator, menu and similar, which you can paste anywhere you want and use it with pen



• starter guide for familiarising yourself with the pen

Let me explain what is it all about. The pen has a camera on the top, which records all the tiny “micro“ dots on the paper and tint which cover them and because of this, it can transfer handwriting to digital shape. As you may have concluded already – the main disadvantage is that you must use special paper also know as “Dot pattern“ paper, paper which has millions and millions of tiny microdots on it, which reflect the positioning of the pen itself. Every single page/paper/notebook which is available for this pen, is already written for the pen, so without any problem, the pen “knows“ where it is, on which page/notebook and in which row – so you won’t have 1GB available with this version, you’ll have about 830MB of free space – this 100 and something MB are used by applications/firmware and, of course, files which are imported to the pen, so it would know “where it is” (therefore, I must admit that files are about 50-200kb which isn’t anything too big). Every single paper/notebook has its own layout of dots, what means that you can’t print out dots just like that and hope it will work. Every page has controls which are just simple “pictures“ printed out, shapes on the paper – that aren’t physical buttons.

The controls are also covered up, but the specific layout of dots (so when you “click“ on them, that is, tap the top of the pen) allows the pen to know exactly what it is on (on which button) and what the pen needs to do. That is the basic principle behind how this pen works. Now you are asking yourself, so how many notebooks can I have? You must buy the notebooks or you can print your own at home (good news). The bad news is that 4 notebooks cost about $20 (if you are outside of US, you must add shipping costs and that’s expensive). The other option is printing at home. The disadvantage is that you (for now) can print only 4 notebooks with 25 pages (12 sheets) – a total of 100, if you merge up 4 notebooks into one and you need a printer with a resolution of at least 600dpi, a PostScript compatible printer (therefore you can work around it with the GSview program) and the manufacturers say “colour laser printer“ but there is bunch of users who have succeeded in printing out the above mentioned with normal inkjet printers, as many users have at home. You can track up to 22 notebooks simultaneously (combined all types of notebook, 4 lined + 8 single subject + 4 unlined + 4 folio + 2 paperblanks). If you will combine the same (same number/type of notebook) notebook simultaneously the pen will read the two “same“ notebooks as one and there will be some technical confusion and general “ruin” the process (double notes and similar). | correction by gopi

Now we return to the pen, so we get the pen and we unpack it, we press the Power button, but nothing happens – you must charge it up (though some sources allege that the pen came to them charged up already). Charging the battery from 0-100% is about 2,5h over USB which is relatively fast, and the battery lasts long (it’s hard to “outlay“ it). After starting charging, finally, we boot up the pen and in a few seconds we get instructions on the (OLED) screen for setting the time, date and hand orientation (left or right) – this matters because the pen must know how it must turn the screen (it can be changed later very easily and quickly). For all operations you “click” / tap on the paper, apropos on the border of the notebook. On the border, there is calculator, which you can use, as shown in the video at the end of the article, there is also a printer out and a keyboard, but when you tap on it you’ll get the message “Keyboard coming soon…“.

So, now we have a pen, ready to use. If you want to skip the basic steps (like menu navigation and similar) on the first page of the notebook – sorry, firstly that won’t be possible because you’ll get “System error: 3″ and your pen will be restarted. You must make an update of firmware because of the following bug which I initially didn’t do. I just turned the page and continued further (later, I updated the firmware and the thing is working properly). Firstly, I tried out the Piano application which allows you to draw a piano and play on it. How it looks can be seen on the video at the end of this article.

The application works very well, but fun isn’t the primary thing for which this pen is designed. Second application which comes with the pen is Translator DEMO which contains 21 word in Arabic, Swedish, Spanish and Chinese (Mandarin) languages. Simply you write a word on a paper and on the screen you get a translation and you hear the pronunciation from the integrated speakers in the pen. The application has potential – but they of course must add some more vocabulary first. The application recognized everything that was written – lower and upper case letters, and even my own handwriting too – I was pleasantly surprised :)

In the menu, you’ll also find the Movies category, which is, of course, just for fun because I don’t know who would want to watch movies on the pen, especially with a screen resolution of about 98×17 pixels. The last main application is Paper Replay – it allows you to delete sounds/recordings which you recorded before. The naming of files/sounds is according to time (for example “Today 2:14PM”) – which is very messy and for now you can’t change it, with the pen or the computer. This is one of the bigger software disadvantages, and so far the biggest. Deleting the recordings from the pen you can do from the pen one by one or from the computer with the Livescribe Desktop application. On the pen you have storage for 100h of recordings (as advertised on the web/packaging) – I can verify that for 10min. of recordings it takes up about 3MB of space – recordings are in .aac format and of a very good quality. When you have recorded some sound and you simultaneously write something, it’s enough for you to tap on the written text and the pen will play you the recording exactly the moment that you write it – it works precisely, correct and fast. Though this last, the speed, we’ll see after we fill it up with over 70h of recordings.

The pen is great from a hardware aspect – the microphone is excellent (example – I’m sitting in the last bench with microphone turn to me, when I play the recording I can hear every single teachers word, if you tolerate the provided headphones, there is no better). The speaker is also very good quality (very powerful and loud, but on MAX settings it distorts a little). The pen is generally very light-weight and medium thickness, but of course thicker than a normal one. Here is the comparison: on the left is Faber Castell technical pen, in the middle there is Rotring pen (a little thicker), on the right is marker for CD’s and, finally, the LiveScribe Pulse (smart)pen.

At the bottom side you’ll find a connector for battery charging (you can’t charge the whole battery) over USB dock and on the connector itself is a strong magnet and another one on the USB dock so you don’t need to push up the pen into the dock, hook it up or anything – the pen just “sits” in the dock – compliments to the designers.

As you will see, on the dock there is a sticker for menu navigation, that sticker (shape of menu) appears everywhere – on every page, on the dock, on the protection bag and you can draw one for yourself on the paper. Simply, you make a cross and you tap/click two times in the centre – and there is your menu – you can use it anytime you want – a useful thing. In future, there will be the possibility to create your own shortcuts (for now, that’s not possible).

I have mentioned the headphones before, namely, on the pen you can connect only the supplied headphones because they have their own special connector, namely classic headphones (with classic connector) won’t fit on the pen. On every headphone you’ll find a microphone for better 3D recording (I haven’t tried it yet) but I believe that this methods recording will be much better because a microphone is at the ear level i.e. like you are “capturing” the sound/voice as you are hearing it (same level). The headphones are also very high quality and I don’t have anything complain about them (besides that special connector which looks like on the picture below):

Application are written in JAVA programming language (they recommend using the program Eclipse) and they are executed directly from the pen itself (from LiveScribe, they say that the processor in the pen is as strong as one on an average mobile phone). Everyone can create an application and put it on/into the pen, also you have some pre-created templates for easier understanding of the language and “system” of the pen. So you have a template to show text, play sound and show a picture of “Hello World!”, you have a basic translator and similar. Also, there exists the popular video game Tetris which works quite well. In the planning stage, there is an Online Shop which would allow application sharing for Pulse SmartPen, but there is no precise launch date for it.

An additional part of this technology is, of course, the software, which is – bad. Software, i.e. programme by which you transfer all the audio/picture (textual) information onto the computer is LiveScribe Desktop application. Application is very, very poor with few options – it doesn’t have the basic possibilities which it should have. So, for example, you can’t categorize you audio/textual data by name or similar – it has pre-built folders, so the path to one audio recording looks like this (in Windows Explorer) – My Documents\My Livescribe\Library\ 2594160307599\ 0×1878f237fa2426fc_0\ Sessions\PRS-3b68ef. All audio recordings are named like audio-0.aac – so with Windows Explorer you can’t organize things (besides playing one by one the audio recordings), but the application itself won’t help you very much. You can’t export the page from the notebook to some picture format (like .jpg) – i.e. unless you use MyScript Notes for LiveScribe, which, of course, costs additional money (there exists a 30-day trial). How poor the menus look, you can see for yourself down here:

What you can do (one of better options) is that you can click on green text (the other one is classic – black) and it automatically starts reproducing audio recordings at the same time as writing, where you click with the mouse. At the same time, you can see how you write the text – as though you are right now doing some handwriting. This is the same thing as in notebook, where you tap with the top of the pen, here with click of mouse. One more possibility, which is presented, is that you can upload pages to there website – personally I haven’t tried it so far. There is the Gallery, so you can see how it looks, on there web-page, where users upload and share there own notes. I can notice how the text recognition works very well, in the sense that you type something in your Search bar at the upper right corner (for example Beer) and if you tap Enter you’ll see a yellow highlight all around any words which contain “beer”. English recognition works amazingly well, with all types of handwriting (mine is terrible but it’s recognition was quite good). There have been some reports of software crashing, processors on 100% and similar bugs. Here are a few pictures showing how it looks:

Overall, a very good product – excellent hardware, but the software needs a lot of work, updates and patches which I hope will be in place shortly. It’s not for total beginners because there is a need for some intervention (like the bug from the begin of this article), it’s for users who want to do “research” and who could use all the possibilities of the pen (and not just tap on some Piano :D).

Inset 1: I have realised that the pen already contains some Quick Commands which means that you ,for example, don’t need to use the calculator on the border of the notebook, you can tap twice on the centre of the cross and enter the main menu from where you can just write the Quick Command, in our case CALC for calculator. The application will start in a moment and then it’s enough to write 7*9+2= and when you put equal sign (=) the pen will calculate the result. Unfortunately, for now this is just DEMO application i.e. accept only positive numbers, decimal ones and four basic mathematical operations – addition (+), subtraction (-), multiplication (*) and division (/). The disadvantage with this is that signs for multiplication and subtraction must be written as they appear in the software i.e. star (*) for multiplication and slash for division. When the whole application is available, you could change and of course add some other (more necessary and complex) functions.
Other quick commands which are available are – DATE for date, TIME for time, BATT for battery and AUDIO for alteration of audio settings. A good thing is that when you write BATT somewhere, you can use it anytime you like. When you need the calculator and on the top you write CALC, after some time of handwriting, you need to redo it, though you can just tap on that previous CALC text.

I have researched some application for the pen and found the applications Blackjack and U.S. Capital Trivia from Penlets.com. The first application is the card game Blackjack – I can say it works quite well, you need to draw the boxes for Yes/Hit, No/Stay and circles for $1 bet and $5 bet. After that, the game starts and you play against the pen, nice for boring times, and for developers useful to study how to branch the applications.
Another application which I like is quiz capital cities for every single state in USA – the pen will ask you a question „Which is the principle city of *state*?“ and then you write an answer on the paper (handwriting recognition works amazingly), if you write an correct answer, the pen will answer “Correct! It’s *city*”. If you write an incorrect answer, the pen will respond with “Incorrect. It’s *correct city*”. How this looks is shown below: „Which is the main city of Kansas?“, we write “Topeka” and we get the response “Correct. It’s Topeka”. I have modified the application, so instead of capital cities of the USA, I have put in multiplication numbers – multiplication table from 1×1 to 10×10 – so you get, for example, “5×8″ and you must write the result.

It’s a little messy, this article, but I hope that I have mentioned everything. However, if you have any question feel free to ask me (http://en.svebee.com/contact). Here are 3 more pictures for the end:

Installation of application (maybe someone will need this):

• install jdk-6u12-windows-i586-p.exe
• Start – Control Panel – System – Advanced – Environment Variables – User variables for Sven – New – JAVA_HOME = C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_12
• copy Eclipse in Program Files
• copy Prerelease_Livescribe_Penlet_SDK in Eclipse folder
• run Eclipse
• click Go to Workbench
• Help – Software Updates – Avaliable Software
• Add Site – Archive
• choose C:/Program Files/Eclipse/Prerelease_Livescribe_Penlet_SDK/0.9.1/EclipseFeature/ Livescribe_SDK_0_9_1.zip te OK
• check added and click on Install…
• Next – I accpet – Finish
• Would you like to restart now? Yes.
• Windows – Open Perpective – Other – LiveScribe
• New Project or open existing…

Printable Notepads

• install GSView (first GPL GhostScript then GSView)
• downloaded notepads (Printable Notepads) run in GSView and then click on Print

I can say that printing on my personal inkjet printer Canon PiXma iP4300 with replaceable cartridges (cheap ones) doesn’t function, the people from LiveScribe recommend a laser printer so I tried a Monochrome laser printer (it costs ~$110) and it works, it prints the pages, the pen recognises everything (the buttons on the bottom too, which are not in colour because I print with monochrome (black and white) laser printer). You can download package (4 lined + 4 unlined + GSView) here – LiveScribe Pulse SmartPen – Printable Notepads.

(+) Advantages/Pros:

• speed of playing recorded audios
• simplicity (hardware)
• speaker
• microphone(s)
• production quality (pen, dock and headphones)
• everyone can write an application for the pen

(-) Disadvantage/Cons:

• un-open web store with applications
• impossibility to have own name for audio/text
• leaving dots when you type on calculator for example (because of tint) or very frequent use of main menu (the pen recommends that you tap on the edge of buttons which I think is – stupidity)
• “special” connector for headphones
• warranty (maximum 1 year)

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2 comments to “LiveScribe Pulse SmartPen”

1. gopi says:

   19/04/2009 at 18:49

   There is not a specific 4 notebook limit. The limit is one notebook of each type/number. There are 4 lined compact notebooks so I can have 4 at a time. There are 8 single subject notebooks. If I use both styles, that’s 12 at a time. 4 unlined notebooks gets us up to 16. 2 paperblanks, 4 folio, and we’re at 22.
2. Robert says:

   03/05/2009 at 18:23

   The third refill you received is a stylus – it doesn’t contain any ink!

   Nice review.