[Athen] A Small Rant About Livescribe

[Sebastian M Niles via athen-list]

Hello all

I'm emailing with a big complaint about Livescribe and wanted to see if anyone had a similar experience. In the past, our university has ordered Livescribe Echo pens for students that love taking their own notes and want to record as well. The Echo 2s were awesome even if they also tried to get you to connect to a bad app (foreshadowing!!).

Fast forward to now. It appears that Livescribe has discontinued the Echo 2 and is now selling the Livepen (and also trying to get people to use Inq for some reason). The problem with the Livepen is that it doesn't have a built-in recorder, and it forces you to use the Livepen app if you want to use any of its potential features. As I said before, the app isn't great. I don't feel great about making students rely on it when they wanted an offline notetaking option in the first place. All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I have no idea what Livescribe is trying to do here. Why would they abandon the feature that everyone turned to them for in the first place? Why are they still selling notebook paper with options to "record", "pause", and "stop" if the Livepens can't record outside of the app? Who is the target audience here?

Does anyone have good alternatives to Livescribe? I'm not talking about Otter or Genio. I'm looking for something that does what the Echo 2 did. I know I could just give students a digital recorder and call it a day, but I'm hoping that there is some hidden tool that is still committed to doing what Livescribe did.

Thank you


Sebastian Niles, CPACC

Accessible Technology Specialist

Student Disability Center

University of California-Davis

Davis, CA 95616


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