TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

A Pen That Wants to Be a Computer

Kevin Fogarty | Date: 02-02-10 | Comments

Digitizing notes and running apps makes Livescribe a top smartpen option, but it�s no tablet.

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A Pen That Wants to Be a Computer - It's All About the Apps

It�s really the ability to put apps on the pen that Livescribe is pushing as a differentiator, though. The company is distributing SDKs as cheaply and easily as it can, to open the smartpen up as much as possible as a development platform rather than just an enhanced note-taker.

The most obvious apps are dictionaries, specialized dictionaries, calculators, reference books and other content that gives unplugged note-takers the benefit of Google in their hands.

Salespeople can carry a product catalog, all the technical specifications, FAQs and other data they might need about a customer on the up-to 4 GB of space in the pen, and record the meeting so customer objections or requests can be analyzed later, for example.

The first wave of software in Livescribe�s online apps store is relatively mundane: multilingual phrasebooks, dictionaries, the periodic table, measurement-unit conversion utilities, and the like.

There are also more traditional apps -- a helicopter-rescue game, Hangman, sports and music references, and an ask-the-fratboy advice app that promises it will provide an answer to your questions, though possibly not a good one.

Loading the apps is as simple as syncing the pen itself: plug it in, click, drag, and drop. If you�ve used Palm, Windows Mobile or any other handheld devices, nothing about the process will surprise you.

Everything about Livescribe had to be upgraded to support apps, the company said. It needed more memory, better processors and updates to the desktop sync software. Pretty ambitious for a product that only launched in 2008.

There�s a good reason for that urgency, though.

A really smart smartpen -- even one that records audio, does well what it says it can do, and makes all its abilities easily available -- is still a kludge.

A better option is to carry a computer that�s small and light enough not to be obtrusive, but powerful enough to bring apps, data, Internet connections, and multimodal input (typing or handwriting) with you when you leave your desk.

That�s exactly what Apple has promised with its recently announced iPad, and what a dozen other computer makers offered in the ultralight and tablet sections of CES this year.

Tablets, which do everything the Livescribe can do and quite a lot it can�t, are on the list of big things that will hit the IT industry this year. To be fair, they were on the same list five years ago, and still haven�t been that big a hit.

Still, Livescribe is the most successful mixed-media note-taking device I�ve tried so far, and the one with the greatest range for growth in the future. At list prices of $199 for the 4GB version and $149 for the 2GB, it�s pricey for a smartpen, though cheap for a tablet.

It�s also big and heavy for a pen, slow for a computer and has a pretty small screen on which to read all those dictionaries. If you don�t want to wait for a tablet, or don�t want to rely on future technology to improve note-taking you need to fix now, I�d put Livescribe high on the list of tools with which to do that.