In my personal mission on improving my daily life by making it simpler and more productive, I’m currently trying to go “all digital” whenever possible to cut down on the paper stuff I have around me.

For example, when preparing my next article I do intensive research on the different angles of the topic I’d like to write about. It is during the research stage that I create a lot of written notes to keep my main point in my articles.

I am the haptic type of guy, you know?
I like to scribble and write things down … with pen and paper!

And to be honest, it’s not easy to organize so much content without help. I always look for tools to help me get more organized and when I first heard about Livescribe a couple of years ago, I was really excited. I have worked with tons of digital note-taking solutions and my biggest gripe has been that those solutions prevent me from using something similar to pen and paper.

This is where Livescribe is so different. With this system you use actual pen and paper to jot down your ideas into a real notebook. Also, it is very intuitive and the advanced features of the whole system are really easy to learn. The pen has a special software which helps in importing all of your data, including audio recordings and writing, into the iOS device. It is also very easy to share the data through other services such as Dropbox and Evernote. You can even export the notes in PDF version which means that these can be easily shared, too.

I must admit, the developers have made major improvements since I bought the first version of the pen. Now, the third version of the pen is available and it works directly with iOS devices. You can easily transfer all of the data to an iPad or an iPhone almost instantaneously. One of the best things I like, and what as been improved drastically, about the pen is that it fits naturally into the hand and is very easy to use.

Even though it looks bigger in size than a regular pen, I have never felt uncomfortable using it when writing. In fact, I think it is more ergonomic compared to a regular pen. The developer team behind Livescribe changes the basic features in the software on a regular basis. For example, in the earlier versions you could perform many different functions through voice as well as by using the tiny screen on the pen. These features are gone.

You need to buy special notebooks in order to use the Livescribe pen, because these notebooks use paper with special pattern. This pattern is not visible to the bare eye unless you look for it closely, and the inbuilt infrared camera inside the Livescribe pen works by recognizing the pattern on the special paper.

It is really cool! The only downside with Livesscribe pen is that it only works with this paper and notebooks made of this special paper are costly as compared to regular ones. However, I still stand by Livescribe, as the extra expense has been totally worth it for me. Even though the notebooks cost comparatively more on their own, the overall cost of the system and the time I save using it turns out to be much cheaper when one compares the total cost of alternatives. In addition to special paper, a special cartridge is needed for the pen. This cartridge does not last as long as regular cartridges but I do not think that to be a major problem especially in light of the overall benefits of the Livescribe system.

A good number of improvements have been made in the evolution of the Livescribe pen. This third generation now comes with a soft tip in the shape of a cone, so users can also use this pen as a stylus for their touch screen devices. The latest version turned out to be a bit tricky for me as the instructions provided in the manual don’t do a good job at explaining a few things. For example, it took me some time to figure out the location of micro-USB slot.

The developers offer a very neat looking and user-friendly iOS app with a clean user interface. The pen itself uses Bluetooth to connect to the app and I had to wait a bit before I was finally able to connect to the notebook. The app on my iPad Mini took a bit to catch all of the live writing on the notebook and I even lost the Bluetooth connection at the beginning. I decided to restart the pen as well as the app to reactivate the Bluetooth connection. The good thing about this system is that everything is stored safely in the pen even when the app on the mobile is unable to pick up live writing.

One of the most impressive features of the system is the text feed to the Livescribe app on your iOS device. I won’t claim that it works in a smooth manner, in fact, there is a noticeable lack but I feel that this is due to the limitations of current technology. I had set up my Livescribe pen with both iPad Mini and iPhone 5S and it has been working well with both the devices. However, when it comes to legibility, screen size plays a huge role. My notes scribbled on iPhone are not very legible whereas whatever was scribed on the iPad Mini is much more legible.

The pen does not come with a separate case for storage. It has a retractable tip which comes out by twisting it in the middle. The company supplies the pen with a starter notebook of 50 pages and I must say, that the size of the page as well as number of pages is really small as compared to the notebook that came with the first version of the pen.

Personally, I have not found the time to really check the sound recording option. The developers have made changes so that all of the recording is now done on the phone app. I think this is better as the recordings tend to take up a lot of space and shifting the recordings to the phone keeps a lot of space free on the internal memory of the pen. The optical character recognition property of the software is really good, as it had no problem in converting my scribbles into proper text. It does not have much luck with cursive writing but it works great with block letters.

Picture credit: aforgrave via Photopin CC