Livescribe Pulse Smartpen

Despite the similar look and comparable micro-dot paper technology, the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen is significantly more sophisticated than the Oxford Papershow and its 50 per cent extra cost is well justified. This pen has a computer on board, is fitted with 2GB (£129.99) or 4GB (£169.99) of memory, and you don’t need to turn your PC on to take notes.

Although it uses the same type of paper, Livescribe’s stationery comes in a variety of formats, from spiral bound pads to Moleskine-like notebooks. Your handwritten notes are stored on the pen, not a PC, so your notes go wherever the pen goes. It also records sound so, if you’re in a meeting or lecture, it can record both the notes you’re taking and the voices of the people speaking in the room.

The user interface lets you control the sound recording on the paper – all pages of the notepads have a variety of ‘buttons’, such as play, pause and volume control, so you can listen to the recordings you’ve made by tapping the relevant symbols on the paper. The sound is also linked to the section of the paper you were writing on during the recording so, if you tap on a particular part of your notes, it’ll play back the recording from that point. And, because each Livescribe page you use is embedded with a unique pattern, you can write across as many pages and notebooks as you like and the sound recording will still sync with your written notes.

Connect your pen to your PC with the supplied cable and all your notes and recordings are archived on the computer. You can search for words and notes and also share the notes as PDFs and the recordings as AAC files.

But this is only scratching the surface – because the pen is a computer it can perform calculations, translate words and play games. There’s even an application supplied that lets you draw a piano keyboard, then play it. The potential for this pen’s applications are nearly endless – we expect there’ll be a lot of add-on software available just around the corner.