If you are someone who takes a lot of notes, whether it's for college or work, the idea that a pen could eliminate half your workload is a seductive one. That's what LiveScribe has been offering since its first pen was released in 2008.

The idea is simple: using special paper, you take notes that are stored to the pen and can be transferred to your computer, where it’s a matter of running the file through some desktop software to turn those scrawls into text that you can email, add into word documents or simply store for future use. And did we mention the ability to record audio along with the notes?

But the pens were a little on the bulky side, expensive and the audio recording could pick up ambient noise, such as the pen scratching on the paper.

That has all changed. The latest version of LiveScribe’s hardware is the LiveScribe 3 Smartpen, an altogether sleeker version of what has gone before, and one that uses low energy Bluetooth to connect to your smartphone to transfer notes in real time.

Gone is the built-in microphone – it uses your phone’s mic now – and the OLED display, with a small light to indicate if the pen is connected to your device.

Is it an improvement? Somewhat.

The Good

Your notes are sent instantly over Bluetooth to your iOS device, whether it’s your iPad, iPhone or iPad. That means you will always have a copy of the notes even if you’ve lost your notebook along the way. It also syncs with Evernote and One Note, so you can copy notes directly to your online storage.

The ability to send the notes over Bluetooth is far preferable than having to plug the pen into a USB connection. Notes are replicated in real time, so you can check that the pen is recording things accurately, something that you might have had to take on faith with previous versions of the pen.

You can turn your notes into text by swiping on the sections you want. To turn them back into handwriting, you simply repeat the action. And if the notes have been translates wrongly, you can edit them on the app – preferably through an iPad rather than the tiny iPhone screen.

The design of the pen has also been changed to make it a little more pleasing to the eye. Users of the previous incarnations – the Pulse pen, etc – may remember the bulky nature of the device, which could be a little off-putting. There’s no screen on the pen either, something that users complained became virtually unusable over time.

Plus the battery life has been improved.

The Bad

While the audio being recorded on your iPhone or iPad is preferable to having recordings marred by scratching of pen on paper, it also causes one or two issues of its own. Make sure you have enough space for the pencast, or else you will find yourself with only part of a vital voice file. And if you are using your iPhone and someone calls while you are mid-session, the audio recording will stop. Keep a close watch, or divert your calls.

The pen is only compatible with iOS, so Android users and Windows Phone owners are out of luck. That makes little sense given the spread of Android phones, particularly among students, and the fact that the service links up with Microsoft’s own OneNote software.

Getting the notes turned into text is hit and miss, and slightly torturous at times. Obviously, it depends on how clear your handwriting is – which, for many people jotting down notes, is going to be “not very” – and the notes are, for some reason, organised into what the app describes as feeds. If you are taking large swathes of notes, this is where the process becomes painful. The feeds don’t necessarily correspond to an entire session – it could be a line, a paragraph or a page, and you have to either link them all and then translate, or spend forever swiping.

The PDFs created from pencasts are a bit more difficult to work with. You have to download them to your computer and open them using an online player, which is currently in beta. Unfortunately, several attempts in two different browsers failed to get it to work properly, so we were stuck with the iOS application.

The Rest

You need to use the special paper that the LiveScribe 3 and other pens in this range use to get your notes to record to your iOS device. That sounds like an expensive business, but if you have access to a quality printer in the office, things get a little easier. There are several printable notebooks in PDF format available from LiveScribe’s website that you can download yourself and print.

One caveat: the printer will need to be capable of printing at 600 dots per inch, which is a standard for laser printers, but not inkjet. So if you have a laser printer on standby, you can print as many notepages as you like.

Each of the notebooks will be recorded in the LiveScribe app separately, along with each individual page. That makes it easy to find notes and the voice files if you need them.

When voice is recorded along with the notes, it turns the text on the digital notebook green, alerting you to the presence of a voice file. It’s all synced up too, so all you have to do to hear a particular part of the audio file is use the pen to tap on a word. That really useful if you have pages of notes and you need to check a line or two.

If you’re a previous user of LiveScribe products, it’s worth noting that the LiveScribe Desktop software isn’t compatible with the new pen.

The verdict

Useful for iOS users, but there are a few things that could be improved, especially given the price.

3 stars

Livescribe.com 

€150