The coolest thing ever!

I am a geek from way back. Not a nerd, mind you, but a geek. Geeks have some social skills. Hey! Don't scoff! I have social skills! I just choose not to use them most of the time. Anyway. I am also a gadget junkie. Well, except if said gadget was produced by Apple, and then you can keep it far away from me, thank you very much.

I have just discovered the coolest invention ever in the history of the world! Yes, even better than high heels and handbags! Ok... maybe that's going a bit far. Maybe it's sharing top billing with those two.

Ladies and gentlemen! I present to you, so that you may bask in its glory and emit sighs of awe and wonderment...

The Pulse Smartpen, from Livescribe!

Ooh! Ahh!

Seriously, click on that link and watch the video. This is the coolest thing ever! Well, as long as you have some reason to be recording stuff as you write (student, secretary in meetings, journalist, etc). But it doesn't just record stuff as you write. Oh no. It does way more cooler things than that. When you dock the pen, it uploads all of the notes and audio you have recorded, and this then becomes searchable. So if you're studying for your exams, and can't remember what the lecturer said about a particular area, just type that term into the search function of the Livescribe Desktop (software you download onto your computer), and it will pull up all the pages where you have written that term, and you can then listen to the audio accompanying it.

The pen only works with special Livescribe dot paper, but you can print this for free if you have a colour laser printer. Otherwise, the notebooks and journals aren't really all that expensive. They also come with a sheet on the inside with a printed calculator and other settings (such as volume, room type [lecture room/conference room/etc], etc). These printed buttons actually work! You can just touch the calculator buttons, and the pen will show the calculations on its little screen. And it's not just a basic calculator either. It has financial buttons and scientific buttons (such as cos, sin tan, etc). There is also a keyboard on the back page of my starter journal, but it isn't yet activated. When I touch it, the pen says, "Keyboard coming soon." I presume when it's activated, I will be able to type things by touching the keys of the printed keyboard.

There is also an apps store (currently in beta) where you can download games and other interesting applications. I have downloaded a full Spanish dictionary, so that I can write a word in English, tap it, and the pen will tell me the Spanish equivalent, and vice versa. There are also translator applications where you can write a word in another language and the pen will speak the word in English (or vice versa) so you can hear the pronunciation.

I also downloaded a few games, like blackjack, hangman and helicopter. With blackjack, you just draw buttons on your paper for hit, stay, double down, bet and split, and then touch the button you want. The cards are shown on the Smartpen's screen. So far, I'm up $100.

The pen also comes with headphones, so you don't irritate people around you. I have written out a page of my favourite songs, and played each song as I wrote the name. Now, I can go back to that page (if I'm bored at uni, or whatever) and touch the name of the song, and the pen will start playing the song!

There are buttons down the bottom of the page to navigate through the pen's menu, to start, pause and stop recording, to assign bookmarks to particular points in recorded audio (which you can then skip to), to increase/decrease the volume output, to change the speed of the audio (chipmunks!), and to skip through the audio. You just tap these printed buttons whenever you want to.

Seriously, I am in love with this pen! I actually can't wait for uni to go back so I can start using it to its full potential! Even William (who is also a gadget junkie) is jealous of it! He wants one, but has no actual use for it. I am going to a meeting this afternoon, so I'm taking it with me. I can't wait to use it in a real world setting!