Review: Livescribe Sky WiFi Smartpen links your ink and audio to Evernote

The Livescribe Sky pen marries old-school pen-and-ink with the cloud. If paper remains a core part of your workflow, this is the best pen of its kind on the market. You can save notes and audio recordings to your Evernote account via Wi-Fi, or you can plug in a Micro-USB cable and save your work to a PC or Mac.

The pen is fairly bulky, but it's pretty comfortable to hold. It would stick out from inside a pocket but it slips easily into a travel bag. The pen cap is easy to lose and hard to put on, so I usually left it off (and the tip didn't suffer from the exposure). Livescribe makes smart use of its tiny LCD screen, displaying Wi-Fi and battery indicators as well as the time and date. Dive deeper and you can play with the display: Use your handwriting and the interactive "buttons" in its supported paper notebooks to play simple games, run equations on a calculator, and translate words. There's even an ecosystem of apps, including dictionaries.

Other smart pens, such as the Adapx Capturx, let you write on any type of paper, but I've found those better for paper-form input versus freehand writing. Livescribe requires special (and pricey) paper, with tiny dots on the page that track your writing with precision.

The Livescribe Sky pen is designed to be paired with Evernote, so it won't be of much interest if you don't use that app. It's a plus, though, if you enjoy Evernote's productivity features (and you get an Evernote Premium account for a year). Use tidy penmanship with your Livescribe pen, and Evernote's optical character recognition can translate that into digital text.

Do you need the Livescribe Sky pen? For most people, that's an easy no. For example, you can always take a picture of handwritten notes from your smartphone and send it to Evernote, so why pay between $120 to $250 for a smart pen? One reason is that Livescribe does cool stuff other devices can't, including syncing audio recordings and written notes. This makes it a great tool for journalists covering events. Students and teachers could benefit, too. An instructor could share "pencasts" that explain trigonometry ratios, for instance, while students take interactive notes to spell out the formulas and shapes during class.

The Sky pen is also more portable than even a tablet with a supported pen. While serious artists will need Wacom-level sensitivity, Livescribe's pen is good enough for casual sketches. Its battery lasted for weeks as long as I remembered to turn it off regularly.

The Livescribe Sky pens cost $170 for 2GB (200 hours recording), $200 for 4GB (400 hours) and $250 for 800GB (800 hours). The Sky pen's wired predecessor, the 2GB Echo smart pen ($120), is also still available. Hook it up to a Mac or a PC, and you can upload notes to Google Drive, Facebook, Evernote and OneNote.

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Evernote vs. OneNote: Note-Taking Apps Showdown

Among the many options for storing information digitally, the biggest players in the note-taking software market are OneNote and Evernote. These applications come in handy for taking notes, making lists, managing projects, storing and organizing information, and sharing it with others.

OneNote has been part of Microsoft’s Office suite since 2003. It emulates the way a traditional binder works, with pages of notes organized into sections and stored in notebooks. OneNote is unique in that it allows you to add content anywhere on the page. Sadly, it is not included in the Mac version of Office, but Microsoft has released mobile apps for iPhone and iPad.

Evernote opened to the public in final form in 2008, and it has since grown quickly to 20 million users. Evernote can store all kinds of information in notes, including Web clippings and attached files as well as audio and video notes. With desktop apps for Windows and OSX, full-featured mobile apps for Android, iOS, Blackberry, and WebOS, and a strong Web app, Evernote’s best feature may be its cross-platform compatibility. It’s also free, with extra features for users who sign up for a $45/year Premium account.

Both Evernote and OneNote cover the basics of organizing and storing information, but each goes about it in a different way. I have both programs installed on my desktop, laptop, Windows tablet, iPad, and Android phone (I do have to use a third-party program to access OneNote on the Android phone), and both applications play an active role in my writing and teaching.

Basic Text Notes

Microsoft's ribbon interface (left) has more features but looks more cluttered than Evernote's text editor.Text notes are the most basic form of note-taking, and the format you’re most likely to use if you carry a laptop to meetings. Both programs handle text as a basic word processor does, with rich text editing options.

Evernote's text editing interface is clean and easy to navigate, with options similar to what you would find in a Web editor like Google Docs. When you start a new text note in Evernote, you’ll just get a blank space to write in, but rather than being divided into pages like a Word document, the text appears as one giant block.

OneNote's options are very similar to Microsoft's Word, including the ribbon interface. If you're used to Word, finding options in OneNote should be similar, but the look is more cluttered than Evernote's interface. One major difference with OneNote’s layout is that text is contained in boxes, which you can move anywhere on the page. You can drag and reorganize your thoughts around the page without having to cut and paste.

Winner: Evernote is the better tool for basic text notes due to its cleaner interface. If you need more complex formatting, OneNote would be the better choice.

Multimedia Notes

Sometimes you need to add more to your notes than words alone--a chart or an image, say, or even an audio recording of the meeting. Both OneNote and Evernote let you add images, audio, video, and files including Word documents or PDFs to your notes.

OneNote does audio and video, and you can place those files anywhere in the note.In Evernote, files, audio, and video are added as attachments to notes, while images are added inline. You can add images from your computer, or take a new snapshot with your webcam. Audio attachments are limited to 2 hours in length if you’re a free user, and 4 hours for Premium users. Video is limited to Premium users only.

With OneNote, you can add multimedia items anywhere within a note. Starting an audio or video recording will create an icon for the file in the note, and selecting that icon will bring up playback controls. Images also appear in line with your notes, and you can resize and reposition them. When you drag a file into your note, you choose between inserting a link to the original file, inserting a copy of the file onto the page, or inserting the file as a printout so you can read it directly from within OneNote and even add notes on top. All of these elements are independent on the page and can be moved around separately.

Winner: Evernote is great for grabbing quick audio recordings if you just have your phone with you, but OneNote syncs your notes to the audio or video playback and can even index spoken words for later search, making it a better reference tool for longer recordings.

Ink Notes

Ink notes in both OneNote and Evernote.Sometimes handwriting notes as if you had pen and paper is the most comfortable way to store information. It can be especially handy in a meeting to have a tablet flat on the desk and write with a pen, rather than having a laptop open, creating a barrier between you and the other attendees. Unlike pen and paper, "ink notes" in either Evernote or OneNote are indexed and searchable just like notes you’ve typed in.

With Evernote, you can choose to create an ink note to take handwritten notes, but that's all you'll be able to do with it. Ink cannot be mixed with any other type of content using the desktop application, and you cancreate ink notes only with the Windows desktop application. You’ll be able to view your ink notes on other platforms, but not create new ones. Some mobile apps that sync with Evernote also support ink notes, like the Notes app on the HTC Flyer tablet, but those are third-party.

OneNote has a far more robust inking system thanks to Microsoft's years of work with tablet PCs and handwriting input. You can place ink anywhere in a note, including on top of documents you have printed in. The ink is contained in a box like text, and can be selected and moved anywhere on the page. You can leave your ink as ink, or have it converted to text. OneNote also has more color and pen-size options including highlighters and shapes. One of my favorite tools in OneNote is the ability to add blank space between things you've already written--you don't have to try cramming some added thought in between two lines, you can just create more space.

OneNote comes with a variety of templates.

Winner: OneNote wins hands down on handling ink. If you like writing by hand or need to mark up documents, OneNote is the clear choice.

Templates

Templates are great for a variety of situations. Meeting notes, calendars, to-do lists, charts, forms, and reports are all much easier to create if you already have a template in place. OneNote comes with a variety of templates, and you can also make new templates from any existing page. You can also choose from a variety of lined and ruled backgrounds for taking handwritten notes. Evernote will give you a blank page for typed notes, or lined yellow paper for ink notes. It offers no other options.

Winner: OneNote wins this one by default. The best you can do with Evernote is creating lists with checkboxes for To-Do items.

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