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Livescribe suggests using a computer to share the wi-fi, or tethering the pen to your phone’s data connection.Ī few of Sky’s features aren’t going to be available at launch. The only catch: You can’t sign onto networks which involve a special web page for logging on, such as many public ones in coffee shops and hotels. In my tests, setting up the Sky on my home network was a breeze: You use a special page in the notebook that lets you tap on icons and a printed keyboard to connect and enter the password, which took less than a minute. It feels like more of a convenience and less of an additional complication. But the wireless syncing and Evernote integration make the ink-to-digital transition far more seamless than before. In short, Sky is still aimed at folks who’d rather write with a ballpoint pen than type on a real or on-screen QWERTY keyboard, and who don’t find the need for special paper to be too much of a hassle. The Sky can also interact with printed or hand-written controls on its special paper, such as “Record,” “Play” and “Stop” buttons. It all gets synchronized, so if you’ve been taking notes during a class or meeting, you can tap on a word and listen to the recording for that precise moment. The pen is also a capable audio recorder, and you can capture sound as you write. (It comes with a 50-page notebook more paper is available from Livescribe, and you can print out pages on a color laser printer.) It doesn’t convert your handwritten jottings into editable text everything is saved to Evernote precisely as you wrote it, in your handwriting. You use the Sky with paper printed with a fine grid of dots, which lets the pen capture and digitize what you’ve written and/or drawn. I found the review unit Livescribe provided to be comfortable enough to hold despite its bulk, but its odd cap is surprisingly tough to put on and take off. As before, the pen is a cigar-like ballpoint with an OLED screen on the side and a Micro USB port for charging. The basic smartpen concept hasn’t changed. If you’ve got a device that Evernote supports - and it supports just about everything - your Livescribe notes, sketches and recordings will just be there once the pen has synced, which it does without your intervention. The Sky also introduces a software change which is just as significant: Instead of depending on its own proprietary software, it simply plunks everything into Evernote, the omnipresent note-taking app/service which Livescribe says a majority of its customers already use. It’s introducing a new flagship model, the Sky, and the major improvement to the hardware is that the pen now incorporates built-in wi-fi, eliminating the need to do transfers via USB.
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Now Livescribe has a smartpen in tune with the times. And we’ve come to expect that most gadgets can connect directly to the internet, without a computer as a mandatory middleman.
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Livescribe desktop software for mac or windows Pc#
These days, busy people of the sort whom Livescribe targets don’t always spend as much time at a PC as they once did they might want to get their notes and audio onto a phone or tablet instead. That’s how you tended to get data off a gizmo in those days.īut an awful lot has happened in five years. And the fact that you did the syncing with a USB cable and special software (available at first only for Windows, and then the Mac) seemed only natural. Follow Livescribe introduced its first unique smartpen back in 2007, its core feature - the ability to take notes on special paper, with synchronized audio, and then transfer everything onto a computer - was cool.
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