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Livescribes smartpen has two primary features: It records ambient audio along with every pen stroke of your handwritten notes. But not all its uses are immediately obvious.

I bought the new, higher-capacity, more ergonomic Livescribe Echo in August and have spent the last few weeks putting the pen through its paces. Ive also gathered up testimonials about the device — mostly from other journalists, who understandably love it — and questions and tips from ordinary users.

Just like our How to Do (Almost) Everything With A Kindle 3, this is a list of (almost) everything you could do with a Livescribe Echo smartpen — plus a few Q&As at the end.

Indexing Audio

Among journalists, the Atlantics James Fallows has been the most enthusiastic and eloquent supporter of the Livescribe. In The Pen Gets Mightier, Fallows describes his love for the smartpen, particularly its ability to match handwriting with audio. “The result is a kind of indexing system for an audio stream,” Fallows writes. “For me this means instant access to the three interesting sentences I just write ‘interesting!’ in the notebook or put a starin the typical hour-long journalistic interview.”

In my experience, as in Fallows, this is absolutely game-changing. Ive tried a number of devices to record interviews, from traditional recorders to my iPhones Voice Memo app, even Google Voice for telephone calls. None of them are as reliable or useful after the fact as the Echo.

It captures ambient speech remarkably well, even at distance. It even works fairly well recording a speakerphone-to-speakerphone conference call, a feat that gives a good deal of trouble to most peoples ears, let alone their recording gadgets.

You can play back recordings using the pens built-in speaker, or by uploading the pencast to your computer. There the Livescribe Desktop application (on Mac or Windows) can print your written notes to a PDF file or export your audio for archiving or editing.

Its particularly useful to export written notes to online notemanagement applications that can handle PDFs like Evernote for remote storage.

Recording Speeches and Classroom Lectures

In The New York Times, Wired columnist Clive Thompson profiled Brian Lacata, an Oakland math teacher whose students all use Livescribe pens in his class.

In the classroom, the smartpen is a curious mix of the traditional and the high-tech. As Thompson notes, the pen is based on an age-old classroom technique that requires no learning curve: pen-and-paper writing. But while audio recording has been used for some time (not without controversy) to tape lectures and meetings, it changes with the use of the smartpen.

When Lacata’s students take notes, “the pen alters their writing style: Instead of verbatim snippets of Lacatas instructions, they can write ‘key words’ essentially little handwritten tags that let them quickly locate a crucial moment in the audio stream.” Essentially, it offloads the raw-data–recording component of note-taking to the audio stream, while placing the tagging, indexing, thinking and questioning components firmly within script. Instead of notes, you’ve recorded a mind-map.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Greyscale screenshot of A Bard’s Tale

Amazon’s Kindle reader isn’t going to get amenities like color, video capability, a camera, or an accelerometer in the foreseeable future. But that doesn’t mean we won’t see a rich variety of specialized applications for it. A recent high-profile hire at Amazon offers one possibility for the future of Kindle apps, while two Kindle-watchers have offered different forecasts.

Amazon recently hired away Andre Vrignaud, Microsoft’s Director of Game Platform Strategy. Now, Vrignaud worked on many different platforms at Microsoft, from XBox and XBox Live to PCs and mobile phones; presumably, he’ll do the same for Amazon, especially since Amazon already offers casual game downloads for Windows PCs. A revitalized, multiplatform game streaming or download service for Amazon is intriguing, but let’s set it aside for now to focus on gaming for Kindle.

Here, Vrignaud and Amazon face a challenge, as they have to chart a game platform strategy that works within the Kindle’s limitations. These aren’t just technical, but are circumscribed by the Kindle’s user base, few of whom are likely to use the Kindle for heavy gaming even if they’re interested in it.

The sweet spot seems to be black-and-white word games, like you might find in a book or newspaper. The Kindle already has two word-puzzle games available, Every Word and Shuffled Row. It’s easy to imagine crosswords, Sudoku, Scrabble, and the like for Kindle — it’s almost unfair to call this casual gaming, since its fans are so passionate. And I’d wager there might even be a market for vintage text-based computer games, many of which are terrific to play for a few minutes at a clip. Any five-hour airport delay would be a lot more interesting if I could bang out Zork or A Bard’s Tale or entertain my son with Oregon Trail on that terrific Kindle battery while I was waiting. (Note: I’m deliberately the pit of hell that is casual gaming for Facebook, but clearly those companies could clean up here too.)

But games are just the beginning of an ecosystem of Kindle apps. We’ve already looked at a few ways you can make Kindle 3’s much-improved browser work like a champ for news reading, but just like with smartphones, a dedicated RSS application could potentially suit some users even better.

At iReader Review, RSS readers are listed along with email clients, weather apps, finance apps, and chat as functions currently performed using the browser that would make natural apps for Kindle. The author makes a strong case for these apps as indicative of the kinds of apps that will do well on the Kindle — providing focused information in a client specifically tailored to the Kindle device and Kindle user.

Livescribe’s app store provides a potential model for the Kindle; an array of pencil-and-paper games, translation services, and reference applications, all perfectly suited for a simple text interface and black-and-white display.

Finally, there’s the one-in-a-million possibility. One of the biggest knocks on Amazon had been that its Kindle supports its own unique formats but not ePub, an e-book standard many other companies have rallied around. There’s no way Amazon would ever allow an application that duplicates its e-reader function, allowing you to read DRMed or cracked Amazon e-books. Amazon even has a clause in its terms of service forbidding generic readers.

Popular Sun-Times tech columnist Andy Ihnatko, though, recently claimed in a podcast that several app makers were working on building an ePub client for Kindle — and that Amazon had given them the go-ahead.

Now, some people think Ihnatko was confused or misinformed, and it’s quite possible that Amazon could allow a reader for open, non-DRMed ePub files while still barring all the books you bought from Barnes & Noble.

Still, it’s an intriguing possibility — and Amazon could certainly use an App marketplace to open the Kindle to becoming a general document viewer (and casual writer) of a wide range of files without writing a line of code themselves.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews