TechGearLab

The Livescribe Symphony Smartpen is an impressive digitizing tool, sending anything you write on Livescribe's microgrid paper notebooks directly to its associated App. If you like to record lectures or meetings while taking notes, this is absolutely the pen we recommend for you. The app organizes audio recordings as Pencasts, which include any notes you take while recording audio. It also saves them in a separate, easy-to-find folder in the app. The audio is time-stamped by your notes, so you can navigate back to a specific discussion easily. The Symphony's round shape is easy to hold and write with, which helps to keep your handwriting natural, neat, and tidy. It also has a stellar battery life and does a reasonably accurate job of translating your written notes to text. You can choose unique line colors and thicknesses before you write or afterward, but we don't usually bother.
This excellent smart pen is only held back by its app, which is less user-friendly than we'd like &#40;except when it comes to audio files&#41;. Instead of organizing your notes the way you write them, as full pages, Livescribe breaks them into random-seeming snippets. You can only translate one snippet at a time from handwriting to text. It's easy to do &#40;you just swipe right or left&#41; but much more time-consuming. If you're more likely to record audio during lectures than you are to convert your writing to text, this is a high-quality, high-value option. While a stylus writes directly on a touchscreen, a digital pen sends anything you write on paper to an app. It's an extra step, but if you dream of escaping screens while keeping all your best ideas safe and sound in the digital cloud, this is the tool for you.

The Livescribe Symphony Smartpen wins top honors for its natural writing experience and intuitive Livescribe+ app. The pen is round, smooth, and one of the most comfortable in the test. When you write on the proprietary micro-dot paper in Livescribe's notebooks, the app will capture your musings in real-time, or whenever you next link it to the pen. It sorts them into digital representations of each notebook, lets you edit your writing or artwork, accurately translates your handwriting to text, and will search for keywords in translated or tagged text. The app will also record audio as a pencast through your phone while you take notes. The app sorts these audio files separately, and they are easy to find. You can also download videos of your writing or drawing in sync with the audio. The Symphony has an impressively long battery life with 10 hours of claimed writing time. We left it on for 7 hours and it still retained 99% of its battery life. 
While the app makes it easier to deal with audio files, it makes it harder to transcribe text than the Neo Studio app that works with the Neo Smartpen M1+. The app randomly sorts your text into "snippets" that you must transcribe individually by swiping across them to the right or left. You can select and merge snippets that you wrote on a given page to recreate the notebook version. In contrast, the Neo Studio just transcribes a page at a time. Those extra steps are annoying but far from deal-breakers. We recommend this pen for its long battery life, accurate transcriptions, excellent audio file storage, and relatively low price tag considering its strong performance. Put simply, it is more capable than any other smart pen in our line-up.  

The Livescribe Symphony Smartpen Bluetooth is an impressive digitizing tool, sending anything you write on Livescribe's microgrid paper notebooks directly to its associated App. If you like to record lectures or meetings while taking notes, this is absolutely the pen we recommend for you. The app organizes audio recordings as Pencasts, which include any notes you take while recording audio. It also saves them in a separate, easy-to-find folder in the app. The audio is time-stamped by your notes, so you can navigate back to a specific discussion easily. The Symphony's round shape is easy to hold and write with, which helps to keep your handwriting natural, neat, and tidy. It also has a stellar battery life and does a reasonably accurate job of translating your written notes to text. You can choose unique line colors and thicknesses before you write or afterward, but we don't usually bother.
This excellent smart pen is only held back by its app, which is less user-friendly than we'd like &#40;except when it comes to audio files&#41;. Instead of organizing your notes the way you write them, as full pages, Livescribe breaks them into random-seeming snippets. You can only translate one snippet at a time from handwriting to text. It's easy to do &#40;you just swipe right or left&#41; but much more time-consuming. If you're more likely to record audio during lectures than you are to convert your writing to text, this is a high-quality, high-value option. While a stylus writes directly on a touchscreen, a digital pen sends anything you write on paper to an app. It's an extra step, but if you dream of escaping screens while keeping all your best ideas safe and sound in the digital cloud, this is the tool for you.

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The Neo Smartpen M1+ also has a comfortable round shape like the Livescribe Symphony and non-smart pens. It's easy to write with, turns on when you start writing or press power, and can be linked to the Neo Studio App to show your writing in real-time, or you can upload it after the fact. You can transcribe handwriting into text by a page at a time, edit line strength and colors in the app, and record audio to sync with your notes. Scribblings are handily arranged by notebook &#40;as well as Google Calendar or Outlook-synced planner&#41; to easily distribute to your digital world. The app works in conjunction with this pen extremely well.
Unfortunately, the M1+ offers less accurate transcriptions from handwriting into text than the Livescribe Symphony. It still performs well enough to be helpful, and if you just need to go back over your notes to study, you may not use this feature very often. You also have to be sure to buy Neo's compatible notebooks, but that's the case with most smart pen options. All told, this is an excellent option with a great accompanying app. You'll just have to do a little more editing in post to touch up your notes.

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