![]() I really like the Livescribe notebooks – they feel like quality items, like premium bound notebooks I’ve bought in the past.įor me, it’s the best of both worlds. If you’d just given it to me as a pen, I wouldn’t have known it was a gadget. There is definitely something quite spooky or magical about seeing live replication on an iPhone or iPad of whatever someone is writing or drawing in a basically ordinary notepad! Here’s a quick video:Īnd here’s what Steph has to say about the feel when writing: It’s also surprisingly light, at 27 grams, which doesn’t feel notably different to the Apple Pencil 2’s 21 grams. It’s black metal, with a gunmetal grey cap, and I don’t think anyone would look twice at it unless they happened to recognize the brand name. Finally, if you really object to paying for them, or want to create something customized to your own needs, Livescribe provides free templates which let you print your own microdot paper in various formats. But they are not crazily priced compared to regular ones of equal quality, and there are third-party ones available too – including Moleskin. Of course, that means buying special notebooks, which do carry a price premium over standard ones. The pen needs to be used with paper which contains barely-visible microdots, which help it track the movement of the pen across the paper. If using a camera to capture pen movements sounds pretty damn clever, there is a slight cheat involved. To activate the microphone, you tap a recording symbol that is printed on each page of the notepads. This would obviously be useful for things like lectures and interviews, where you can jot down summary notes and then easily play the accompanying audio for any section of it. You can activate this when you want to capture live sound alongside your notes. Second – and this is what distinguishes it from most other digital pens on the market – there’s a microphone. You can choose the format in which your words are stored: either the original handwritten text, or it can use built-in optical character recognition to turn them into plain text. It can also feed your notes into Evernote. It does this via a number of different cloud services, including Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneNote. It can do this live – whatever you write or draw appearing on your iDevice in real-time – or it can store more than 1,000 US letter pages worth of writing and drawing for syncing later. This records everything the pen writes and transmits a digital version of it to a companion device – an iPhone or an iPad. First, a camera, pointed down at the nib. It’s a conventional pen, which writes on paper, with a couple of additions. I may have no use for one personally, but it’s definitely something I consider a cute gadget. What is the Livescribe Symphony digital pen anyway? ![]() So this is effectively a review by proxy: I’m just reporting back on her experiences. I love doodling, for example, so something that started as very straightforward notetaking becomes art. I love the way I can completely make a notebook my own. Writing on paper is a sensory experience, the feel of it, the smell of the paper, the textures that affect the way the nib moves across the page. I love the feel of it, the same way I love paper books rather than ebooks. All of which doesn’t make me an obvious candidate for a digital pen designed for use with paper …īut while I view paper notepads as quaint historical artifacts, my girlfriend loves them, for reasons I’ll let her explain. I did eventually find a vague excuse to buy an Apple Pencil, but even that was a bit of a stretch and I still don’t use it for anything else. If it’s shorter, I’ll generally dictate to Siri. ![]() If I’m writing anything more than a few lines, I’ll use a keyboard. I haven’t handwritten anything substantive for about three decades. As regular readers of my iPad Pro Diary will know, I Do Not Do Writing. I have absolutely no business reviewing the Livescribe Symphony digital pen. ![]()
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