Livescribe's new smartpen with Wi-Fi links to Evernote

What you write and what you hear can now be sent directly to the cloud with a new smartpen from Livescribe.

Introduced Monday, the Sky Wi-Fi smartpen will digitize what you write and hear and automatically send it to your personal account on Evernote.

If you don't have an Evernote account, a free subscription to the premium version of the service is bundled with the pen, as has been done with Livescribe's other smartpen products.

Once in the cloud, your notes and recordings can be reviewed and organized on a computer or mobile device, such as a tablet or smartphone. Notes in Evernote can be searched and shared, and audio recordings can be played back on the company's Web-based Livescribe Player. What's more, you can jump around the recording by clicking or tapping a note or drawing associated with it.

The Sky Wi-Fi smartpen is being offered in three versions: 2GB (200 hours of audio) for $169.95; 4GB (400 hours of audio), $199.95; 8GB (800 hours of audio) for $249.95. In addition to being available from Livescribe's online store, the smartpens will be offered at Best Buy, Fry's, Apple stores, and at a number of campus bookstores.

Searchable, Shareable Notes

Notes can be searched by tags, titles, and keywords linked to the scribblings, as well as words within notes. Both notes and recordings can be shared with others either publicly or privately through a direct link, email, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

Livescribe

“With the Sky Wi-Fi smartpen, [our customers] can easily capture important ideas, presentations, and conversations in the most natural way, on paper, and they automatically appear right where they want them—on their mobile devices and personal computers," Gilles Bouchard, Livescribe chairman and CEO, said in a statement.

Livescribe is marketing its Sky product as a companion product for computer tablet users. According to a survey of those users conducted by the company, 54 percent of them still use handwriting as their primary form of note taking.

Yet, 85 percent of those users say it's somewhat or very important to them to have hand written notes on their tablet or smartphone.

In addition to its Wi-Fi pen, Livescribe makes another version of its smart scribbler, Echo, which allows you to send notes and recordings to Facebook, Google Docs, Evernote, mobile phones, and IOS devices when the pen is synchronized with a desktop computer.