When I was a student back in school, I always dreamt of owning a “magic” pen that could transcribe notes for me so I didn’t have to develop that repetitive strain injury we all got from writing copious and somewhat irrelevant class notes we never looked at. Well, Livescribe has done that and will have students around the world chomping at the bit to get their hands on the Echo Smartpen.

The pen itself is an impressive piece of construction with a built in multi-directional microphone, a brilliantly clear loudspeaker, OLED display and best of all a massive 2GB of storage, good for over 200 hours of recording; All wrapped up in a sleek and unassuming design.

The purpose of the Echo is to record everything you write and hear. You can then simply replay your notes in high quality audio by just tapping on the page. You can even go back to notes you took months or even years ago.

It gets better! The pen connects to your PC via micro-USB and syncs with Echo’s own Desktop application which takes all your notes and stores them in essentially a digital notebook. The interactive document or pencast as it is known allows you to see and hear the notes you took. We were very impressed with just how easy it was to sync our notes to the desktop app. What was even more impressive was the nifty search feature, where you simply type in a word and it will find it in the pencasts you have synced.

With the ability to share interactive PDF’s(including audio) with others, this could be a game changer for business professionals too as a clever way to deliver information to employees.

We have been more than impressed with the brilliant simplicity of the Echo Smartpen and can see that this is a creative – perhaps the best – solution to note taking in 2016.

Get yours at a special low price – Livescribe 2GB Echo Smartpen