Livescribe

My current smart pen is made by Livescribe. It is a ball-point pen that remembers what I write if I use special paper.

The Livescribe is a good stylus input. I currently have the Livescribe Symphony model. I would link you to information about this model, but the company seems to hate backward compatibility with a curiously incandescent passion. When they introduce a new model they delete all references to the previous ones, pretending they never existed, so my pen from 2022 has been blotted out of history.

Some models have bonus features I don’t use, such as audio recording. You can find more about such features on the internet, but I will say nothing further on that due to not caring. I simply wish to write stuff and digitize.

The experience of writing itself is smooth. The pen has a big memory, so I do not need to sync to my smartphone often. Livescribe uses Anoto dot patterns. The basic idea is that if you use special paper with a barely-visible dot pattern on it, the pen will encode all the pen strokes that you make upon that page, thanks to a camera concealed in the pen tip. It seems to be remarkably high resolution and low-error.

A real mean sting is that it plays mandatory advertisements for other Livescribe products before it lets me use the one I just now paid a lot of money for. The former problems I could attribute to incompetence, but playing mandatory advertising in a way that degrades the usefulness of the product is malice, and substantially increases the likelihood that I will switch brands to a competitor. It transfers data to a special app Livescribe+ (iOS/Android) via Bluetooth, then via a cloud service such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, or OneNote to other devices. The major weakness is the smartphone app is obnoxiously bad: awful, clunky, crashes regularly, and is infrequently updated.

Aside: What is with the app name? If I bought a laptop and it came with an app called “Laptop+”, that was essential to executing basic functions, I would be suspicious about the fitness-for-purpose of my laptop.

And no, there is no option on that list that simply transfers files to your hard drive. It must go via the hard drive of some unaccountable third party. As such, do not use it to write notes on anything if you do not want police and spooks reading it. There is a “share” option which allows manual, (more?) secure export via other apps.

A real frustration is that the writing experience for this device is so good, so simple and easy and intuitive, that it makes the unnecessary pain points introduced by their terrible software even more vexing by contrast.

People have been complaining about the app for 7+ years now and the update policy has been at best intermittent. Do not buy the pen in the hope that the app will improve. If this were a priority for the company they would have demonstrated that before now.

This is so close to an amazing, luxurious experience, but they dropped the ball just before the goal. It is as if you are an aspirational cook, and a Michelin star chef lends you their staff and kitchen and you can use it all you want, but it is on fire.

UPDATE: There is a desktop app called Livescribe+ which circumvents some of my criticism (e.g. going via cloud for no reason) and works on the more recent models. I have not tried it yet.

Here are some links I’ve needed for the Livescribe. They are probably obsolete: one of Livescribe’s many irritating habits is suddenly migrating content to new places without redirects. By the time you read this, they will probably be broken yet again.

• Software downloads deleted without forwarding link.
• Un-pairing Livescribe 3 from a device or multiple devices (e.g. because your phone died).
• New dot paper for self-printing. They deleted that and left no forwarding address. Here it is: Printing free Livescribe dot paper and controls online
• Ink cartridges are somewhat expensive and take a long time to arrive, so I have learnt how to unclog ballpoints in order to keep them going. Soaking them in isopropyl alcohol seems to have the best success rate.

Question: how bad a security breach is it to lose one of these pens? I suspect very bad, since it will remember a LOT and seems to have essentially no authentication.

I really love the Anoto dot pen technology. Their hardware is wonderful. I wonder if there is a company that is better at deploying it than Livescribe? Apparently Anoto have made a few mis-steps in their commercialisation and generally do not have a better spin-off technology licensee, or at least: searching for the alternatives I found on Wikipedia led only to discontinued products.