Livescribe 4 GB Echo Smartpen

by Livescribe

• Smartpen with 4 GB of memory, redesigned with anti-roll body and rubberized smaller grip
• Capture thousands of pages of notes and over 800 hours of audio (recording time varies by audio quality setting)
• Share notes and recordings privately or online with 500 MB of free storage
• MicroUSB connector lets you transfer notes and audio to your Mac or PC
• Standard 3.5mm audio jack for use with your favorite earbuds

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 0.5 x 6.2 inches ; 4 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B003RAE19Q
• Item model number: APA-00006
• Batteries Lithium Metal batteries required. (included)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (312 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
  • #35 in Electronics > Portable Audio & Video > Digital Voice Recorders
  • #42 in Electronics > Accessories & Supplies > Computer Accessories > Input Devices > Digital Pens
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 15, 2010

Product Description

Size: 4 GB

Amazon.com

Pencasts allow you to hear, see and relive notes exactly as they were captured

Easily send notes and audio to people and destinations

Take the stress out of tests and meetings with an Echo smartpen from Livescribe. Record everything you hear, say and write, while linking your audio recordings to your notes. Quickly replay audio from your Livescribe paper, a computer, or a mobile device--all with a simple tap on your handwritten notes. It's never been easier to take notes and stay organized.

Record and Play Back

Smartpens record everything you write and hear so you'll never miss a word. Replay your meetings or lectures simply by tapping on your notes¹.

Save, Search and Organize

Livescribe Desktop saves your notes and recordings to your computer for fast, easy access to what's important. Search for words within your notes and find what you need fast.

Send and Share with Livescribe Connect

Easily send notes and audio to people and destinations such as Email², Google Docs², Facebook, Microsoft OneNote, Google Sites², MyLivescribe, your mobile device or your computer³--all from your paper or Livescribe Desktop.

The Echo Smartpen is Livescribe's most powerful and easy to use Smartpen. View larger

4 GB of Memory: More Space for Recordings and Notes

When digitizing your notes and audio you'll need storage space; with 4 GB of memory, your smartpen has it. An 4 GB smartpen can hold over 800 hours of audio* or 128,000 pages of notes.

Included Smartpen Applications

Your Echo smartpen comes loaded with applications ready to work right out of the box:

Livescribe Connect Premium: Easily send and share notes and audio to Email, Google Docs, Facebook, Microsoft OneNote, Google Sites, MyLivescribe, your mobile device or your computer

Quick Record: record audio without using dot paper with just a press of a button

Quick Calc: Write an addition, subtraction, multiplication or division problem on dot paper and get the answer on your smartpen screen

Launch Line: launch your favorite app by writing its name

Password: protect your recorded paper replay sessions with a 4-digit number

System Utilities: multiple language support, time, date, storage info, and battery charge

Dot paper allows a Smartpen to capture everything it writes

Livescribe Dot Paper

Livescribe dot paper uses regular paper printed with a unique pattern of tiny microdots. This tiny pattern works a lot like a GPS system for your smartpen. It allows a smartpen to capture everything it writes or draws on dot paper.

Livescribe smartpens only work with Livescribe Dot Paper, so there's a variety of dot paper sizes and types available: College-ruled Notebooks, Lined Journals, Blank Journals, Mini Journals, A5-sized Notebooks, Grid Notebooks, Flip Notepads, and Sticky Notes. You can even print your own dot paper for free from within Livescribe Desktop on many printers.

What's in the Box?

Livescribe Echo Smartpen with 4 GB of memory, Livescribe Connect Premium (includes Connect Basic plus additional connectors for Email, Google Docs and Google Sites), Livescribe Desktop software for Mac or Windows, 500 MB of personal online storage, starter dot paper notebook, Micro USB cable, interactive Getting Started guide, Smartpen Tips and Tricks guide, 2 smartpen caps, 2 ink cartridges.

System Requirements

• Windows XP 32-bit SP2 or higher, or Windows Vista 32 or 64-bit, or Windows 7
• Intel Mac with Mac OS X 10.5.5 or higher
• 600MHz CPU or higher
• 300 MB minimum free disk space
• Available USB 2.0 port
• Livescribe Desktop 2.7 for Windows or Mac OS
• Smartpen firmware version 2.7 or later
• Internet connection

Which Livescribe Echo Smartpen is Right for You?
Total Hours of Recoding Time*	200	400	800	800
Livescribe Connect Basic Evernote, Facebook, Microsoft OneNote, MyLivescribe, your mobile device, and your computer
Livescribe Connect Premium Includes all Connect Basic connectors plus Email, Google Docs, and Google Sites
Smartpen Portfolio
3-D Recording Premium Headset
MyScript for Livescribe Software Converts handwritten notes to digital text
Livescribe Desktop software for Mac or Windows
500 MB of Personal Online Storage
Livescribe Starter Notebook
Micro USB Cable
Rubberized Grip
Ink Cartridges		2	2	2
Smartpen Caps	1	2	2	2

*Actual recording time varies by audio quality setting.
¹Livescribe paper required--don't record without permission
²These connectors are available only with Livescribe Connect Premium
³Mobile device access requires Pencast Player App or Flash-enabled web browser

Product Description

This next generation smartpen has all the same features as the award-winning Pulse Pen, plus a few really impressive new ones. Livescribe Echo comes with more available memory to record lectures, meetings & more, and simultaneously links your written notes to your audio giving you up to 800 hours of interactive notes. In addition to the new ergonomic design and roll-proof rubberized tip it also now offers password protection and will even let you use the pen to "draw" right onto your computer screen!

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

626 of 663 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfecting the nearly perfect July 20, 2010

By G. Ware Cornell Jr. TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Size Name:4 GB

I am a great believer in Livescribe's smartpens. The first offering three years ago Livescribe 2 GB Pulse Smartpen has worked perfectly ever since. It is not exactly svelte, but it had the capacity to record 200 hours of audio and has proved to be an extremely reliable and useful tool for a busy litigation practice.

The Echo is a refinement of the original Pulse. It is slimmer, and doesn't quite look like one of those metal cigar containers. It has twice the memory of my original smartpen. The price has come down over the years significantly making an investment in a smartpen even more attractive.

I use my pen to record initial client interviews as well as depositions. I am able using the Livescribe Desktop software to export a recording to a CD and send it to a client to hear. However the best feature is its "point and play" technology which allows me to listen selectively to a recording on my pen by touching a word in my notes. The audio immediately syncs to the part of the conversation and has a five second "skip back/skip forward" feature to account for slow writers like me. I can also listen later to my notes and add additional points of interest.

Audio fidelity is amazingly good. The pen has settings for different environments like lectures or office meetings. Even if you just use the default settings you will be pleased with the output.

Besides being thinner, the new Echo no longer requires a cradle, and attaches directly to a USB port on your Mac (that's me) or PC.This eliminates one more gadget I need to lug around in my briefcase.

Livescribe's special paper should not intimidate any prospective purchaser. First it is possible to print your own paper. Livescribe suggests that this requires a laser printer, but I have actually done it with an injet. You have to test in any event whether your printer is compatible which is how I learned some inkjet printers will work.

However users will find Livescribe notebooks to be very reasonably priced. I buy Livescribe ANA-00018 Single Lined 100 Page 5-8 Notebook - 4 Pack which makes the cost per notebook very comparable to ordinary spiral notebooks. Clearly Livescribe is refusing to adopt the model of printer manufacturers who make most of their money on supplies.

There are applications available for the Echo including a text recognition app that offers a 30 day free trial. However my handwriting is usually indecipherable even to me so I have never tried it. However the idea is great.

In the universe of Livescribe pens this is probably the one which should command your most serious consideration. 4GB is an an enormous amount of data and recording. I have never come close to filling 2GBs although I do remove recording from the pen from time to time while maintaining the audio on my Livescribe Desktop.

Livescribe has perfected a product that, as a tool for lawyers, for students, for physicians, and salesmen, as well a host of others was nearly perfect.

555 of 590 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Works Well on Windows; Mac Software Sluggish & Handwriting Recognition Add On MyScript Does Not Work Well August 25, 2010

By SanjeevP TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Size Name:4 GB|Amazon Verified Purchase

Amazing! is the first reaction to this device. Here are the things it can do, and generally well.

1. Write like a regular pen.
2. Record voice or sound like any digital recorder.
3. Link the written notes to the recorded sound. So if tap on a written word it will play the sound recorded at the time that word was written.
4. Upload handwritten notes and voice to computer.
5. Share your written notes and audio (Pencasts).

The sound quality is fairly good. There are lot of add on apps available like games, language translation, piano etc. which I have not used so far except MyScript, which does not work very well. It comes with two fine black ink cartridges, no medium, and I wish there was one included. The writing was faint with fine tip and it was scratchy to write. So I had to order an extra pack of five Livescribe ARA-000007 4 Medium Blue and 1 Fine Red Ink Cartridge cartridges. Sometimes the writing is faint on the computer even with medium tipped blue cartridges.

PROBLEMS

1. BUGGY MAC LIVESCRIBE DESKTOP SOFTWARE: Echo pen does not come with any software, you have to download that from the web site. LiveScribe Desktop for Mac software is very sluggish and glitchy. You will be watching the spinning wheel for a while (3:48 minutes) when it starts, it will keep on asking you for email address and password and not let you use the program until you do. And if you are not connected to the Internet, the LiveScribe won't stop spinning until you connect the Echo pen. Windows software is actually better, faster and does not hang up like that. After you connect the pen, it takes a while for the notes to show up. Although you can archive the notes from one pen to one computer, there is no way to transfer notes to multiple computers because archiving the notes removes them from the pen. The first time I connected the pen, it updated the firmware automatically.

2. DIFFICULT TO PRINT CUSTOM PAPER: Another problem is that you have to buy notebooks and paper from LiveScribe. As far as I can make out, they do not sell A4 size paper. You can print the paper on some Postscript color laser printers. I could not print the paper on Dell 5100cn color laser printer, either with Dell Postscript driver or with Adobe generic Postscript driver but I was successful in printing the paper on Brother MFC-9840CDW Color Laser Multifunction Center with Wireless Interface and Duplex - but only from the Mac LiveScribe. It took a long time - 2 hours - to print 25 pages! Interestingly, the custom notebooks could be printed only in Mac Livescribe, not from the Windows version. The file was 200MB. You have to print one full notebook of 25 pages at time and you cannot print partial notebooks, say pages 1-10. And you can only print total 100 pages (4 Notebooks with 25 pages each). So if you want to use more than hundred pages, you have to archive a notebook before you can do that. That limits active pages to 100 at a time! This is the biggest drawback I found for my purpose because I need to have hundreds of active records at a time where I can write information on multiple days. The same limitation also applies to their notebooks. Despite using 1200 dpi resolution for printing, the quality of writing was still poor when it showed up on the computer. So I ended up using Livescribe Single Subject Spiral Notebook ANA-00017, 4-Pack, Nos. 1-4 which have A4 size paper, but punched.

3. NO EASY WAY TO BACKUP: The data transferred to the computer is saved in one of those obscure and hidden Windows & Mac folders that are hard to find for non techies and will not back up unless you do global backup like Windows Backup or Mac Time Machine. You cannot save your data in custom folders. Even though, I had everything backed up, I could not restore the the data when my hard drive died and lost all archived notes. Three technical support reps from LiveScribe could not restore it. First two said they will call back and let me know but never did. The last technical support rep did get back to me in Email and said they could not restore my backed up data. After losing lot of data (300 A4 pages), I now save all notes as PDF files in my custom data folders and also upload to Evernote. I do not record lot of audio and so far the free Evernote account has been sufficient. Integration of Windows LiveScribe with Evernote works well.

4. POOR HANDWRITING RECOGNITION ADD ON MyScript: My main purpose in buying this pen was to convert handwritten notes to computer text. For that I had to buy a thirty buck add on called MyScript for LiveScribe which does not work so well. Even with clear cursive writing it does not recognize many words and has particular difficulty with technical words, so you have to add each word one by one into the dictionary, and cannot import your Microsoft Word or Pages dictionary. Very tedious process. But it has Auto Replacement, which works like Microsoft Word Autocorrect, e.g. if you write 3m, you can program it to expand to 3 months. That is the work around to poor handwriting recognition.

5. ANNOYING UNTETHERED CAP: Like every one else, I found the loose cap very irritating, it can be easily lost. Are you supposed to keep putting and removing the cap all day long? It is not clear to me why they couldn't make a retractable pen or why the cap cannot be held in place on the back of the pen or tethered with a small cord. There is no clip on the pen to clip it to your pocket either. You will find this very annoying.

6. NO AUTO ON & OFF: If you forget to turn the pen on by pressing the on/off button, the pen will not record anything. I cannot understand why the pen does not have auto on, it should turn on as soon as you start writing on the paper. The on off button should be behind the ink cartridge, so it turns on just by the process of starting to write. Or may be they can fix this with a firmware upgrade.

Overall, it is great for students to record lectures, attorneys, journalists, conference attendees making notes etc. and you can later on refer to the written notes and /or speech. You can write or record speech or do both and link the two. Those who are going to record a lot of audio should go for 8 Gb; for most users 4 Gb should suffice. If you use LiveScribe notebooks and Windows software it works fairly well. But if you have a Mac, need to print your own custom A4 paper, or need handwriting recognition, then it is a work in progress and needs lot of bugs ironed out before it can become a mainstream product. May be they can have a wi-fi card like Eye-Fi so that notes are automatically transferred to your computer. It sure has the potentiel.

70 of 72 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars More Trouble Than it's Worth December 29, 2011

By Ed

Size Name:4 GB

All in all, it's OK when it works. But the website, on which customer support hinges, is terrible and so maddening to use that it colors my perception of the product. It started when I bought the thing and had some questions. The website is pretty and full of information, but it is a landfill that nobody from Livescribe has ever used pretending to be a customer, I'm sure of that. Try to answer the simplest question. I can just picture a company of three geeks and a marketer: "Everyone has a website, we've got to have a website. We'll put FAQs on it, that way we won't need to waste money on a Help Desk."

Today my ink cartridge quit in the middle of note taking. My first. How to change it? Go to the website, find a forum question. Answer: Start up the Livescribe desktop software and read the Help page. Doing that takes you BACK to the website where one is instructed to... Grab the cartridge, pull it out and stick the new one in. Why not just say that in the first place??? That is so typical of Livescribe customer support.

Then, several pages of notes later, I upload the notes and they look like I never lifted the pen from the paper. Back to the website where I find that these things might happen -- So, twist the cartridge 90 degrees, make sure it isn't bent.... Why not say that back on the first page? Or the Help screen??? An hour of notes -- useless.

Earlier this year I went for a long time waiting for them to get their software caught up with some bug or other. Meanwhile my pen was sitting with notes on it that I couldn't get off. Try troubleshooting that.

So today I went to leave a comment on the website and was told I have never registered -- it doesn't recognize my email address. Bull. And the spam I get begging me to give their pen as Christmas gifts somehow knows my email address. So, I leave my comment here: I'm about ready to put this thing away, simply because of the customer service.