LivePen Digital Smart Pen | Requires Livescribe Paper | Bluetooth | Wireless | Mobile Phone Compatible | APX-00701

This pen is great. Sync it up, charge it up, take your notes and then sync it to the app later. It's awesome. Makes your notes searchable instead of having a pile of notebooks you never return to, now you can keep your notes forever and actually get useful information out of them years after you wrote the note.

In order to use the app, you have to agree to a privacy policy that is very broad and ambiguous. It says they get access to your handwriting data. They list specific examples about the data you upload and how it's used, but as far as I can tell (IANAL), they retain the right to do pretty much anything they want with my handwritten notes, short of claiming it as their own intellectual property.Here's the thing. It doesn't have to be this way. I got this to replace a Livescribe 3 that was falling apart a little, but still functional. I did a test with it: disabled wifi and cell data and took some notes. It transcribed them perfectly. The new app and pen fail this test.Livescribe knows how to do local handwriting recognition. They've done it for years, and the phones have only gotten better. I don't know why they made this change, but frankly the way things are going in the world I feel more concerned about data privacy, not less. Unless they address this, I'm tempted to return the pen and get a used Livescribe 3 to replace my old one, and keep using it until it breaks or the app stops working.

It is very easy to set up. I find it very useful to keep notes and share with my staff and office coordinator. The battery life is long.

My old live scribe did not work anymore and I'm taking a chance on this one. Works great so farIt also works with my livescribe notebooks that are several years old. I wish that when you remove the cap that it would more securely hold onto the pen. I keep thinking it may fall off and get lost.

I've been using livescribe pens since the mid 2000's when I was in grad school, so when I decided to return to grad school in 2025, it was a natural choice to get the latest Livescribe pen. It was incredible the first time around, after all.And this pen is great too (albeit a bit skimpy on the memory considering it only holds about 12 pages worth of writing). However, there are major issues with syncing between the pen and the notebooks AND syncing between the cloud storage and the apps on my iPhone and iPad. I contacted support right away and at the time of this review it has been 16 days without any solutions offered. They claim to be working on a fix, but the reality is, they haven't delivered.The pen is useless if I can't trust that the data will be stored safely and consistently before I have to erase the pen's memory. Simply unacceptable.

Functionality is close to non-existent. In the app, all you can do is view an image of your notes plus an automatic transcription. There is no way to make corrections to the transcription. Incredibly, you can't even select and copy the transcribed text, which begs the question what the point of the transcription feature is. You can share the page image like any other document (not the transcription, though), but there's no integration with Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. You're better off taking notes on a regular notebook, taking a picture of the page and using the OCR from another app to transcribe. At least that you'll actually be able to to copy the transcribed text. That way you don't have to waste money on an expensive smartpen and the special notebooks required for the "smart" features to work.

The app is awesome - it can read my messy writing. Amazing value for money.

Tracks well and writing is pretty accurate. Easy to put to use and the battery life is not bad at all!