There are some things it’s hard to improve on. The pen could qualify as one. It’s inexpensive, found just about everywhere (especially around my house), and it can draw, write, and fill in most forms. LiveScribe’s SmartPen is out to show that there is a way to make a better pen. The initial product succeeds on many counts. It’s hard to impress a room full of college kids by showing them an old pen’s new tricks, but they were all oohing and ahhhing over the SmartPen.

What’s So Smart About It?

It’s an oversized pen, about the size of a big cigar, with the smarts of a computer inside of it. The Big Idea is that the SmartPen records audio that it can then link to whatever you were writing at that moment. The tip of the pen has a built-in infrared camera that takes a photo of your paper and synchs that with voice that occurred at the same moment.

The pen requires special paper printed with invisible microdots, but the paper is inexpensive.

Clever design abounds, perhaps because this is the next generation of Leapfrog’s FlyPen created by Jim Margraaf. The FlyPen was targeted at young students. The SmartPen is targeted at a more freewheeling adult. A high contrast OLED display on the side of the pen tells you what mode you’re in and instructs you on what to do. An impressive two-microphone system works to cut down on ambient noise (the coughs and twitters in a lecture hall for example) while capturing the sound of the lecturer.

When you place the pen in its cradle and upload the voice and notes to the PC the fun begins. You can share your notes with others or even send out a pencast. You can search through your notes in any number of ways.

LiveScribe’s bag of tricks is pretty amazing. You can record a drawing as easily as an audio. Then click on the drawing and have it launch the corresponding audio.The canned demonstrations hint at the power of the tool. There’s a language translator (tap on a word in one language and it’s translated to another), a calculator, a movie, and more. Because the SmartPen system has been opened to developers you can imagine that it could take off in some fabulous ways–taking a talking course through your pen, getting a shorthand translator add-on, etc.

That’s not to say that all is perfect. I’ve been using the pen to take my notes and the biggest problem is carting my notepad around with me. Without it, my pen becomes a dumb pen. I had to spend some time learning the nomenclature, active ink, sessions, pages, and more. And I wish I could use the pen as a standalone voice recorder so that when I’m walking down the street I could add a voice thought to my pen.

Still, I feel incredibly Get-Smart-ish with my new pen. For interviewing people and taking notes, it’s a great addition to the arsenal of tools. At $149 with 1 GB of memory; $199 with 2GB talk is relatively cheap.