Sooner or later, almost everything goes digital: cameras, camcorders, music players, TV, books, you name it. So far, though, there’s been no successful electronic version of the input device beloved by reporters, students, lyricists and claims adjusters: good old pen on paper.Jim Marggraff, a veteran of both Anoto and Leapfrog, is now at a new start-up company called LiveScribe. This month, it introduced the Pulse smartpen, which Marggraff says is the final step in his vision for “paper-based computing.” In an anodised aluminum barrel about the thickness of a Sharpie, the Pulse has a camera, microphone and surprisingly loud speaker. It also has a bright black-and-white screen (18 by 96 pixels) that displays messages, menu commands and even little animations. There’s a nonremovable, rechargeable battery (6 to 7 hours a charge), a headphone jack and contacts for a USB charging cradle. Oh, and it’s also a ballpoint pen.The Pulse’s primary power is its ability to record audio while you write. Later, if you tap a written word, the pen plays back the audio it recorded at that moment. In the special microdot notebooks, the bottom of each page offers little preprinted “buttons” that control the playback speed, volume and so on. The benefactors of this technology, though, are pretty much the same: students taking notes during lectures, reporters conducting interviews, and so on. It could also be useful when you’re learning a new language (tap a written phrase, hear how your teacher pronounced it) or listening critically to music (if you’re a reviewer, music teacher or “American Idol” judge).The Pulse is more advanced than its predecessors in several ways. It’s the first pen with a screen and microphone, and it contains a huge amount of memory. One model contains 1 gigabyte, enough to hold 20 hours of best-quality stereo audio. Another doubles the memory. The pen connects to its docking stand with a satisfying magnetic click. At this point, all the notes and recorded audio are slurped automatically into a Windows program called LiveScribe Desktop. The company says that a Mac version is a few months away.Once your notes are in this program, you can search for handwritten words—a hugely important feature that lets you pull one audio needle out of a haystack of pages.You can also upload your note pages to a private website, where the company provides 250 megabytes of free storage. Here, you can click your handwritten words or drawings with your mouse to begin audio playback, just as though you were tapping with the pen. The screamingly obvious limitation is the requirement to write on special paper. True, LiveScribe has priced the pads fairly reasonably ($20 for four 100-sheet perforated notebooks), and says that in June, you’ll be able to laser-print your own microdotted paper from a downloadable PDF template. Still, the real fun won’t begin until digital pens work on any kind of paper. Another problem: when you use the pen’s built-in microphone, you record not just your own voice but also the scratching of the pen itself on the paper. Beyond the basics, the Pulse is also jaw-clenchingly hard to learn. This itty-bitty thing actually has menus and submenus; you’re supposed to tap the points of a cross to move through the menu hierarchy. But the pen’s screen can display only one line of text at a time. So not only does every operation take a million fussy little taps, but you have to keep the menu structure in your head, which is fairly hopeless. -DAVID POGUE (NYT)
