Livescribe Pulse Smartpen

I’m always a mug for technology – I’ve just not the money – I like the idea of Livescribe’s Pulse Smartpen which combines a pen and Dictaphone – now the clever part

With a standard ink nib monitored by the high-speed infrared camera just behind it, every pen stroke you make is saved to the 2GB internal memory and mapped to its location on the unique dotted paper. Then connect the pen to your PC via the USB dock and eerily accurate digital versions of your notes are downloaded to the Livescribe desktop client. This alone would be a useful tool, but paired with audio recording it becomes something else entirely.

Just tap the record symbol at the foot of each page – extra paper can be printed on a PostScript-compatible 600dpi laser – and the microphone gets to work, picking up sounds with remarkable clarity. With headphones connected it’s easy to tell where the speaker is in the room, and the beauty is that every word you jot down is linked with the audio being recorded at that precise moment. Simply tap the nib on any word and the linked audio will play back from that point. David Bayon, PC Pro.

For students this amazing – you could have a recording of every lecture in full on your laptop.