Livescribe gets a new pen

I love my Livescribe WiFi pen. For interviews, it is fantastic. It records every word spoken, and links them to your written notes. When it comes to writing the story, I just press the nib on the written word, and the quote plays out of the built-in speaker. The accuracy of my quotes is now breathtakingly good, despite my deplorable inability to do shorthand.

I never really use the WiFi feature, though. All I need is the pen and the notebook. But the way the pen silently sends the audio+notes off to Evernote via my home hub is very reassuring. At least it is backed up.
There are a couple of irritating things, though. One is that it doesn't do handwriting recognition, which I want simply because it is cool. Not because I would find it of any real use.
The second is the little cap that covers the nib, which is tiresome to pull off and put on again every time you want to use it and is eminently losable.
The new Livescribe 3 pen addresses both those issues and more.
The thing you notice first of all is that it's a proper pen. The nib cover has gone - the nib is retracted by turning a knurled ring. And it has a clip, so you can keep it in your breast pocket rather than having it clunk around in your briefcase.
But the Livescribe 3 is different from the Wifi in much more radical ways. It is, in fact, an accessory for a smartphone or tablet rather than a stand-alone device.
The pen no longer records the audio itself, but offshores the task to a smartphone or tablet. The pen just records the keystrokes in the form of digital ink, sending it to the mobile device wirelessly using Bluetooth Low Energy. The mobile device then combines the ink and the audio to create the final Livescribe note.
So far, so much the same as previous Livescribe pens. But the new app also does much more, and adds lots of new capabilities to the pen.

The app has MyScript handwriting recognition that transcribes the digital ink into text with remarkable accuracy. And it is clever enough to recognise dates, so it can create calendar entries automatically, or names and addresses for new contacts. It works very well as far as I could tell from a short practice session.

The app is iOS only, working on iPhones and iPads with BLE, which is all recent models. As yet, few Android devices have BLE so the Android app is not due to arrive until next year.

This will change the way I use Livescribe. It won't be just for interviews, it will be one of the main ways I enter stuff on my iPad. I think it's brilliant.