I've played with one of these and they are pretty neat. As others have mentioned, most of the functionality relies on using special paper which is printed with patterns of dots. The paper doesn't look special though -- the dots are almost unnoticeable, and it's ordinary paper in texture and thickness etc.
The piano-playing functionality mentioned in the article really does work like magic -- draw keys, play keys, done.
In general though, I struggle to think of a reason I'd use it: I type much faster and more accurately than I write, and I seldom have any reason to be matching audio with text transcriptions.
Especially in a class where the professor has an unreasoning hatred of laptops.
But seriously. I bought one out of curiosity and played with it for a couple of days. But while I'd have killed for one during my university days, today I just reach for a keyboard. To get the most out of it, you need to carry around: (a) the Livescribe pen, (b) at least one notepad, and (c) the earbuds/microphones. And you need (d) the docking/charge cradle and (e) a laptop to synch with at the end of the day. If you need pen-based on-the-go note taking, why not buy a second hand Palm TX, or an HP iPaq 210? And if you don't like writing by hand, why are you bothering?
The killer use case for it is where you need to record an audio track synched to your handwriting. For lecture notes, it's a monumental and amazingly cool solution. For other applications, well, I'm still trying to think of one.
This is a really nice implementation of an idea that is undoubtedly great for some people ... just not for me.
Aside from school note taking and small meetings, is there any other purpose to this?
I'm trying to think of another scenario this would be useful.
It would be cool if this could do some basic Visio diagrams or something (even though I haven't used Visio in years).
This seems so darn cool, but I barely write anything by hand anymore. Just some basic design (layout, diagrams) and lists (groceries, supplies, to-do's, etc).
I could imagine this being useful for journalism--you're interviewing someone and recording the whole thing but taking notes about particularly interesting bits. Now it's easy to jump from the notes to the audio recording.
The piano-playing functionality mentioned in the article really does work like magic -- draw keys, play keys, done.
In general though, I struggle to think of a reason I'd use it: I type much faster and more accurately than I write, and I seldom have any reason to be matching audio with text transcriptions.