Capturing, annotating and even doodling in lectures or meetings can be more digital than ever before. What are the options on the market? And, how do you approach smart pen productivity? That’s what we discussed this week on ProductivityCast!
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In this Cast
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Art Gelwicks
Francis Wade
Show Notes | Smart Pen Productivity
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
The 7 Best Smart Pens of 2020
6 Best Smart Pens of 2019 – 3D Insider
Best Smart Pens 2020
Livescribe smartpens (Livescribe Symphony came out between our recording and publication of this cast.)
Apple Pencil
Apple Pencil (2nd Generation)
Google Pixelbook Pen
Samsung active pen
Moleskine Pen+ Ellipse Smart Writing Set
Adonit Stylus
Sonocent Audio Notetaker
Cornell Note-taking method
ScanMarker Air
Squid
Nebo
Wacom tablets and pens
Equil Smartpen 2
Iris
Goodnotes
reMarkable tablet
The Slate (by iskn)
Boogie Board
Microsoft Surface tablets
Raw Text Transcript | Smart Pen Productivity
Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).
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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.
Francis Wade 0:25I'm Francis Wade.
Art Gelwicks 0:26 And I'm Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:27Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode. What we are going to do today is we are going to talk about the digital pen or that is the smart pen. What I'd like us to do today is to compare and contrast good old fashioned regular pens to the concept of the spectrum of different types of digital pens. And we have everything from pens that actually have ink that write on paper to digital styli that are writing on screens, and we'll talk about some of the particulars there. I'd like first also to do a comparison of the Major options on the market. And then to close out, I'd like us to have a little bit of discussion on basic tips for jumping into the digital pen or the smart pen market. If you are interested in a smart pen, what would you want to do? What would you want to do first in getting ready for that type of transition. So let's start off with what the various forms of digital pens are that are out there. So I'm going to cover at least three that I know of and then I'm going to have art explain the fourth since I probably can't do it as well as he can. So So first and foremost, we have good old fashioned pens, right we have ballpoint pens, we have fountain pens, we have the ability to write pen on paper, they require no battery. And in essence, we can digitize that by using our smartphones today and an application like Evernote or OneNote art What's the name of the Microsoft scanning application Office Lens Office Lens they You There we go. So we have Office Lens on the Microsoft platform and the ability to then just capture what we have written on paper with pen into our digital devices. Then we take the next step up, and we have other products that are in essence a an ink pen that has a camera or a series of lasers inside of the tip of the pen as well, that captures what you're writing on either specialized paper or just regular paper. And then that gets sucked into your digital world in some way shape or form. That data can be then turned into live typable text or remain as an as a digital form either as an image or as some other kind of digitized drawing. Then we go to the next step, which is a stylus and then we have the ability to write on screen in essence that requires a digital device where you have a touchscreen that can be written on and or a tablet of some kind that allows you to like the way cardboard is a stylus pad, where you're writing on a specialized board with specialized surface that then captures into your device very similar to your mouse or keyboard are
Art Gelwicks 3:20the other two that I would throw into this mix. One is the one that you see all over the place at like staples, and it's a capacitive end that is basically emulating the end of your finger, you would know it better as just a regular pen that has a squishy black, little almost like an eraser at the end of it. And it's used to create that connection between a touchscreen and the stylus device. The other one is one that is pretty much exclusive to the Samsung world and that's the S Pen. The S Pen is an active stylus that works with Samsung devices. Certain Chromebooks like the plus and the Pro, the also the note range of Samsung phones. Those are active devices that don't have a squishy end, they have a very sharp pen. But what they don't have is a battery. And they're deriving interaction from the screen surface itself. So there are two more specialized cases. But I'd say they need to be included into the mix.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:16That's the spectrum of the various digital pens on the market, or at least digitizing your ink into a device. And so let's get into some of the pros and cons of what is actually on the market. And I'd like to start from one end to the other, which is talking specifically about the pens themselves, and what we know about those particular devices. So I've been a Livescribe smart pen reducer for quite some time. And so Livescribe currently has the Livescribe three and the eight year now. And so the three of those models are the kind of class of similar pens that have in essence a camera that is embedded next to the ink cartridge. And as you as you write it is an essence capturing on on page. Now it requires special paper. So you have to have their notebooks or you need to have the ability to print their their paper, the so the format onto paper. So you can you can in essence like pairing with a levenger circa notebook or the staples Arc System, you can in essence, manifest your own planner, you know and notebook but you have to print that specialized paper in order for the camera to be able to know where you're writing and on what pages you're writing because it actually tracks what page you're on. And that helps it to organize the documents in your system. The the great part about the I think the Livescribe three is that it allows you to write in real time into lifetime typable text on your mobile device. So to kind of explain it, as you're writing in your notebook, you're putting pen to paper, and you're just happily writing along. Now the Livescribe three can capture audio at the same time. And when you click on any one of those points on the page, the physical page, you can jump back to that audio moment, you can also put a star like literally just draw a star on the page and then tap on it, and will actually create a, a bookmark to that point in time. And those are specialized little moments to snap you back to that particular moment in your notes, as well as in the audio. While you're writing in the with the Livescribe. Three though, if you look on your mobile tablet as it's open, it's recording the audio. And if you want it to you can turn that off, and so it can be recording the audio but at the same time, you will see the text being captured. Well at any moment in time. You can just swipe your finger across that text and it turns it into live typable text, you know, like ASCII characters, which is a really, really powerful feature. So, that's the Livescribe three I have not played with the ager but it's a it's, you know, the, it's a cheaper version. So it's about half the price of the Livescribe three, which I'm very curious about playing with it, it's it's got a smaller amount of memory. It's a little bit smaller in size. And I'm it's it's lighter. I'm very curious to see what this pen is all about. But it is the it is their latest duration and I'm presuming their movement into that space. It also auto synchronizes with Evernote OneNote, Google Drive and the Adobe cc cloud platform. We have many, many other pens in the market. We have the we have the Neo smart pen, the end too. We have the moleskin pen plus ellipse and I will put that links to these in the show notes so folks can just at least see them.
Art Gelwicks 8:03I played with the light of scribe when it first came out years ago. And the concept, I mean, seems solid enough, but all it's doing is in my book, at least all it's doing is helping the digitization part of the process, you still have a paper notebook, you're capturing information on the paper notebook, you have to deal with that at some way sometime, unless you're using just like legal pads and throwing the pages out. So while I, I think it helps with the digital transcription part.
