“The essence of our business is the capture, access and sharing of written and spoken information,” Livescribe CEO Jim Marggraff told Gadget Lab. “We happen to have this tool in the form of a pen, but it’s really about capture, access and sharing.”

Paper Tablet is Livescribe’s first effort to expand to an area Marggraff calls “enhanced communication and collaboration” in paper-based computing. The application costs $15 from Livescribe’s online app store.

Typically, you use the Echo wirelessly, writing notes, recording audio and running apps using special notebook paper. Then you dock the pen with your USB cable to upload the notes to the computer. Only then do you get to see what you have and save or export your notes.

With Paper Tablet, you keep the pen plugged in. The notebook is the input surface, and the output is what you see on screen. You can draw, write notes and sign or annotate Microsoft Office or PDF documents. You can also use the pen like a mouse, hovering over the notebook to move across the screen, tapping to left-click, holding the pen down to right-click, and drawing a line to make a selection or drag a window.

Because of the USB connection, Paper Tablet is limited to the new Echo smartpen; it won’t work on the older Pulse, which connects to the computer using a dock. Marggraff said that the company was working on solutions where the pen could connect to the computer wirelessly, although he wouldn’t specify a release date or a specific technology.

See below for screenshots of a hands-on session with Paper Tablet, just after the jump.

PowerPoint Slide Annotated with Paper Tablet. Credit: Tim Carmody

First, a disclaimer: On a Mac, I couldn’t try everything that Paper Tablet can do. In Windows 7 or Vista, Paper Tablet can mark up and save Office 2010 documents of all kinds (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.). Whereas, even Paper Tablet can only annotate PowerPoint documents on a Mac, even with its new Office 2011, and can’t save them.

Marggraff said he hoped to take advantage of better ink support in new versions of OS X, but for now the big push is for the higher-volume platform. (Also, because Windows Vista and 7 are designed to run on tablets, they’ve got pretty robust inking support baked in.) The company is also rolling out support for Google Docs, Evernote and other cloud services before the end of the year.

I was actually surprised at how well the pen worked as a mouse or trackpad substitute. It’s an absolute positioning device: Once you bind a sheet of notebook paper to the screen, the top left corner of the page maps to the top left corner of the screen, and so on. A mouse or trackpad is a relative positioning device: If you move to the top left corner of your laptop trackpad, it just moves you slightly up and to the left of your current position, not all the way across the screen.

After years with a mouse, this takes a little while to get used to — not least because you find yourself trying to keep an eye on the screen, the pen and the notebook simultaneously. Depending on the task, you have to train yourself to ignore one or the other. To annotate a document, it’s better to concentrate completely on the cursor’s movement on the screen so you don’t inadvertently write over what’s been written. If you’re doodling, it’s better to focus completely on the page of paper. And sometimes, you need to do both: An electronic signature requires watching the screen to get the cursor into the proper position, then looking back to the page to make your signature as naturally as possible.

I didn’t get a chance to try this, but the best of all possible worlds might be to print or copy a document you want to annotate onto smartpen-sensitive paper, activate Paper Tablet, and try to mark it up just as you would any other printed document. That’s a pretty complex workflow, without many advantages over just scanning a signed or annotated document, but might be useful in some real-time collaborative contexts.

For instance, I tried to mark up text, like a teacher might do with a student’s writing. (I had to copy it into PowerPoint first, since Paper Tablet doesn’t work in the Mac version of Word.) It didn’t turn out so well:

Screenshot of an annotated PowerPoint document. Credit: Tim Carmody

I don’t think this is the fault of the app as much as the limitations of using the cursor pen function in MS Office. Above, my annotations using the Echo are in blue, my trackpad in green: neither of them look terribly smooth.

In the drawing/collaboration webapp Dabbleboard, both manuscript and drawing turned out much better:

Dabbleboard screenshot. Credit: Tim Carmody

I can’t take credit for that perfect isosceles triangle though: Dabbleboard recognizes common shapes and snaps them into a sharp, regular form.

If you’re doing serious illustration, I don’t think Paper Tablet makes an Echo a replacement for a dedicated graphics tablet like Wacom’s Bamboo series. Like the pen is already, it’s really good for taking notes. Real-time collaboration is a killer app if you’re using teleconferencing services like Cisco’s WebEx and need an extra tool to either think on paper or draw attention to something within a document.

And being able to electronically sign a document in Adobe Reader finally closes one of the last holes in going paperless. Instead of printing, signing, and scanning, you can sign on screen, save and hit send. That’s a lot of time and a lot of ink saved.

None of these are really arguments in themselves for buying a smartpen and a bunch of notebooks. Instead, they augment an already versatile tool and add another suggestive layer of capability to alternative input devices.

See Also:

• Livescribe Echo Smartpen Lets You Do Almost Everything
• Livescribe and Evernote Partner Up for Multimedia Notetaking …
• Digital Pen Gives Boring Note-Taking a Modern Kick
• Livescribe Updates its Digital Smart Pen With the Echo
• Livescribe Pulse Pen Garners Notable Buzz at Demo
• New Wacom Tablet Goes Wireless
• Wacom Tablets Get Multi-Touch, Gestures

Authors: Tim Carmody

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