Gadget Fanatics, Take Note
From: New York Times - 05/08/2008
By: David Pogue

In an anodized aluminum barrel about the thickness of a Sharpie, the Pulse
has a camera, microphone and surprisingly loud speaker. It also has a bright
black-and-white screen (18 by 96 pixels) that displays messages, menu
commands and even little animations. There's a nonremovable, rechargeable
battery (6 to 7 hours a charge), a headphone jack, and contacts for a USB
charging cradle. 

The Pulse's primary power is its ability to record audio while you write.
Later, if you tap a written word, the pen plays back the audio it recorded at
that moment. 

The Pulse is the first pen with a screen and microphone, and it contains a
huge amount of memory. The $150 model contains 1 gigabyte, enough to hold 20
hours of best-quality stereo audio. The $200 model doubles the memory.  

Once your notes are in this program, you can search for handwritten words - a
hugely important feature that lets you pull one audio needle out of a
haystack of pages. 

The pen can serve as a standard, if nearly invisible, digital audio recorder.
Great for spies. 

The screamingly obvious limitation is the requirement to write on special
paper. True, LiveScribe has priced the pads fairly reasonably ($20 for four
100-sheet perforated notebooks), and says that in June, you'll be able to
laser-print your own microdotted paper from a downloadable PDF template. 

Another problem: when you use the pen's built-in microphone, you record not
just your own voice but also the scratching of the pen itself on the paper. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/technology/personaltech/08pogue.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Livescribe&st=nyt&oref=slogin