Livescribe 3 review

The Livescribe 3 is a smartpen that lets you take notes anywhere, such as in meetings and lectures, and transfer those notes to your iPad or iPhone. You can then turn those handwritten notes into text to edited and distributed to other people with the Livescribe+ iOS app.

The Livescribe 3 uses the same technology as its predecessors to capture every detail of what you write or draw. A built-in infrared camera detects the location of the pen’s nib on special paper that has a non-repeating dot pattern. You can either buy dot paper or print the pattern using a laser printer. The standard version we reviewed comes with a 50-page starter notebook.

Like previous Livescribe pens, the 3’s internal storage keeps digital copies of everything you write on the paper. Unlike its predecessors, LiveScribe 3 is designed for use with an iPad or iPhone using the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) standard. It can transmit everything you write on the dot-paper pad to the Livescribe+ app on your iPad almost in real-time. As BLE doesn’t consume much power, it’s feasible to keep tablet and pen paired and active for extended periods of time: the pen has an advertised battery life of 14 hours.

Unlike previous models, the Livescribe 3 looks and feels like a proper pen with a retractable tip. You extend it by twisting a metal ring at the centre, which also switches on the device. A Micro USB at the back of the pen, which is used to charge it, is covered by a rubbery cap that doubles as a broad stylus. It’s no good for fine control or writing, but it’s handy for controlling your tablet without having to put your pen down and makes scrolling through your notes easy.

The Livescribe 3 is much lighter than previous versions, but it doesn’t have the built-in screen and voice recorder that previous versions had.

You can use the special dot paper in the notebook to record, pause and stop audio recordings in the Livescribe+ app. The paper also has icons that you can use to add pages to different categories: flagged, tagged and favourites. Livescribe has made it very easy to access powerful functions such as handwriting recognition and turn your notes into a usable digital form. When it comes to handwriting recognition, the app supports English, German, Spanish, French and Italian, as well as a few regional variations.

The notes you take are posted in the Livescribe+ app’s Feeds screen. The feeds screen shows you everything you create in time order, and things appear almost in real-time. This includes not only notes and associated recordings but also photos.

Each note is separated into a box. When you highlight and flip a note box using a finger or the stylus cap at the end of the pen, Livescribe+ will automatically try to apply MyScribe OCR to turn your handwritten notes into text. While it struggled with our frankly illegible high-speed notes, the OCR process did remarkably well with numbers, block capitals, printing and even neat cursive handwriting. You can even use numbers to create a phone contact or save a date to your calendar, while text can be edited and copied in Livescribe’s text editor and shared via email.

Sadly, we had a couple of issues with dates. In tests carried out before the Livescribe 3’s official release, we found that only dates written in the form of “29th October 2013” were sent to our calendar. Dates divided using slashes were incorrectly identified as phone numbers, while those divided by points could only be treated as normal text.

You can insert photos into the feed, and you can even flip the photo over to make a note on the back of it. However, you can only do this with the onscreen keyboard and not the pen, which is a shame.

You can also create Pencasts, which are a combination of an audio recording and notes. You’ll only be able to record audio with an iPhone, but you’ll be able to take notes as you make the recording and review both the notes and audio at a later time. These Pencasts can be exported and shared with other iOS 7 users via Apple’s AirDrop, or by uploading them to Evernote, which is fully compatible with Livescribe’s Pencast audio and note format.

You can also email your notes as PDFs. These only contain the note part of your document, but do provide a link to Livescribe’s web player, which was still inactive at the time of writing. If you have several compatible phones and tablets, you can link the smartpen to four different devices, although it’ll only pair with one at a time. Written content will be synced to all devices by default, but your audio pencasts will remain on the device that recorded them unless you upload them to Evernote.

The Livescribe 3 is something that’ll be useful in almost any meeting, presentation or interview. The ability to convert notes into legible, editable text quickly and easily is invaluable.

As Livescribe 3 is only available for iOS devices, owners of non-Apple phones and tablets will be better off with a different Livescribe product. Even so, the combination of the Livescribe 3 and the Livescribe+ app is one of the most practical approaches to notetaking we’ve seen. The Livescribe+ app needs a bit more polish and the lack of Android support is disappointing, but the Livescribe 3 smartpen is an excellent business companion for iOS users.