How can I be smart in buying smart pen as gift?

April 14, 2011 7:27 AM

How smart are smartpens?

My search suggested some earlier materials on smartpens but I believe there are newer models for sale now.

Want to get smartpen for wife for birthday (about 150.00 dollars) but am not sure of the pros and cons of such items, and which model and make a useful one to buy.

Wife has desktop at work, laptop at home, attends many meetings throughout the day and week and so thought this might be helpful for her.
Any suggestions on which model or make to buy?
thanks in advance

posted by Postroad to Shopping (3 answers total)

We use livescribe pens for clinical interviews at work. In fact, two different jobs have used them. Their ability to sync audio and writing is extremely good. The microphone is sometimes great and sometimes picks up the scratching from the writing very loudly. I'm not sure if that's a difference in the pen model or the way it's held or what. We just got them, and I haven't done any interviews with them yet, only looked at other people's results, so I haven't had a chance to experiment.
posted by yeolcoatl at 7:32 AM on April 14, 2011

Most of my management at my last job used LiveScribe pens and not only loved them just for making it easier to take what could often be several days of straight notetaking, but also occasionally exercised the ass-covering aspects to good effect.

They all seemed to prefer the diary-sized notebooks to the full size ones, but I think that was just a general notebook preference and not specific to the technology.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:49 AM on April 14, 2011

I'm pretty sure the notebook size thing is just preference. We use full size ones for interviews. they work just fine.
posted by yeolcoatl at 12:14 PM on April 14, 2011