Livescribe Pulse Pen – Installation

Follow-up to Livescribe Pulse Pen – A preamble from Mike Allen's blog

I eventually ordered the 4GB (memory) Livescribe Pulse smartpen from an authorized reseller, Livescribe Europe, along with a set of ink refills and a pack of 4 A4 notebooks. I shan’t waste space here describing the way the pen works in detail, you can easily find that out elsewhere; but it’s worth noting that the paper is special, using a dense pattern of microscopic dots to allow the pen, which is equipped with an IR camera, to know where it is. The refills are also proprietary. All this stuff arrived quite speedily from the suppliers. It was all in good shape, although the pen refills are so thin they managed to slip out of their packaging, and might easily have escaped from the outer box, so I guess I was lucky.

Rather irritatingly, immediately afterwards Livescribe launched a new smartpen called the Echo, which looks a bit more svelte and slightly more feature-rich, but never mind.

Now, I should say, the Livescribe web site, and particularly their user forum area, is not a great advert for the product. There are plenty of rants and raves (indeed, a special section just for those!) mostly dealing with unreliable software and confusing documentation. So I went into this with my eyes open, knowing that I might have to do some searching for the solutions to problems and glitches. The pen itself has its own software, which is downloaded via a docking cradle with USB connection to a PC (you can see that I’m a Windows person). The PC needs to have a piece of software called the “Livescribe Desktop” installed, which acts as a local store for your pencasts, and a gateway to the Livescribe online facility where you can upload them for public access (and indeed, see other peoples’ offerings). It seems slightly reminiscent of ITunes. The first “gotcha” is the interplay between the pen and the PC. Item number 1 in the “Getting Started Guide” says that you may need to charge your smartpen by placing it in the cradle and connecting it to the computer. But if you read ahead to item number 6 you see a warning that you should install Livescribe Desktop before connecting the cradle! Several online rants testify to the trouble that may have resulted from following instruction 1 before instruction 6. Anyway, in my case, installation of software on PC and pen, as well as battery charging, went fine.

It takes a moment to get used to giving the pen instructions by tapping it on particular areas of the getting started guide. So, for example, to check the battery level, you tap on a “battery” button which is drawn on the paper – the picture of the battery is not the important thing, of course, it is the location which, as always, is identified by the underlying, almost invisible, dot pattern. Similarly you configure it for left handed or right handed use, set the time and date, and so on, just by tapping in appropriate places. The “Getting started” guide leads you through this fairly straightforwardly, and then there is a double-sided A4 sheet containing a short tutorial to familiarize you with navigation and the audio recording and replay basics. Seemed fine to me.

Next step was to record, replay, and upload a test piece of my own, and I’ll describe how that went in my next entry.

Michael Allen : 04 Aug 2010 14:37 |  Tags: Livescribe |  Comments (0) |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem