Addendum

Excellent review. I'm a Livescribe Pulse user, and the upgrade to the Echo is certainly tempting.

But the price difference is actually even bigger than implied here, because -- as I understand it -- the stereo earphone/mics (useful for large conference rooms) that come as standard with the Pulse are a GBP30ish cost option with the Echo.

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Chris

By bidmead on 7 Aug 2010

But wait, there's more...

I'd been using the Pulse for months before I stumbled on a key feature of the technology, explained nowhere in the documentation as far as I know.

During the initial audio recording session any written notes you make serve as indices into the audio track. We know that up front.

What isn't so obvious is that whenever you play back that audio from the pen, ANY FURTHER NOTES YOU MAKE ALSO SERVE AS INDICES INTO THE AUDIO.

You probably need to have kicked the kit around a fair bit before you realise the implications of this. No space here to elaborate, but think in terms to repeated playbacks of the whole audio track, or selected sections of it, optionally at faster or slower speeds (maintaining the audio pitch), building up more fine-grained notes/indices with each pass.

Powerful stuff, believe me.

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Chris

By bidmead on 7 Aug 2010

s/think in terms to/think in terms of/

By bidmead on 7 Aug 2010