Gadgetory

lots of absent programs have tried to offer their solutions for note-taking but the truth is nothing beats handwritten notes so if you're one of those pen and paper kind of people there's a solution that combines all the great things about analog notes with all the wonders of technology the Echo smartpen is about to make your notes a whole lot better here's how it works when you take notes using the echo and this special notebook paper the pen makes a digital copy of the notes which you can upload to a computer later plus it records anything you hear or say while you write first I'll tap record here then as I'm writing the smart pen records everything I'm saying as I write when I'm done I'll hit stop and now if I tap that text that I just wrote whatever was being said at the time will be played back then as I'm writing the smart pen records everything I'm saying as I write this is amazing for students who write notes during long lectures or when you're just jotting down notes during a meeting so later on you can play back your notes and jot any other info you might have missed now I also mention that the smart pen digitizes your notes when you connect the pen to your computer and launch the Livescribe software the notes and associated audio will be uploaded open up a page and you'll see your notes just as you wrote them and if you were recording audio with those notes clicking on a word will play back the synced audio it's still undecided about another campaign he was avoiding such offers in this software you can also extract just the audio by heading to the audio tab all your recordings are listed here which you can move to your desktop if you want in the left sidebar is a list of all the cloud services you can sync your notes with so if I use Evernote I can right click a note and select send page to then this window pops up where I can choose a file either with or without the audio then I'll hit continue and the page will be sent to my Evernote account which I can view anywhere later on including on my phone so those are just the basics of the echo smartpen but now that you know how it works let me show you a few tricks for taking great notes with this magical pen you can make a study sheet by first writing out all the terms you need to know then record the definitions for each by tapping record tapping the word sing the definition then hitting stop here's one example near-field communication then when you're studying the terms you can get the answer by playing it back here's a little tip that not a lot of smartphone owners know about if you're playing back audio either by searching for word on the pen or by tapping the notes written to it any note you take during playback will also be associated with that audio so check it out so I'll tap this text here and as it's playing back I can take more notes no white house I'll hit stop and when I tap those new notes that audio will play back from the original recording and finally if you're out and about without a notebook and want to use your pen as an audio recorder you can do that by long pressing the power button make your recording don't forget the milk and the file will be saved don't forget the milk now that you've gotten a little taste of just how useful the Echo smartpen can be check out Donald Bell's full review to get all the details and specs you can find more tips and tricks for this pen and other topics at how to see Netcom for CNET I'm Sharon Vaknin