This pen's battery life is one of the shortest in the test, so it helps to remember to turn the pen off every time you stop using it otherwise, it powers off after 20 min.
It all works well enough, but there are better options. It's primarily a graphic tablet, a flat surface that digitizes anything you draw directly onto your computer, phone, or iPad screen. The Slate's innovation is that it gives you the option to lay a piece of paper on top, so you can see what you're drawing on the computer and on the tablet itself. You can also draw or write with your favorite pen or pencil, provided it fits the included ring.
You can physically tether it to your computer, connect it via Bluetooth, or draw offline in what iskn calls screenless mode and upload it later. We tested the Bluetooth and offline functions, where the iskn works more or less like a smart pen, one made specifically for art. The Slate will not transcribe text and there is no search function for note-taking, so it works best for artists or those who want to capture the written word as is.
We were most excited that it lets you draw with your favorite type of pencil or pencil-sized pen, even a charcoal. Unfortunately, since it's not pressure sensitive, it doesn't pick up on much shading or any of your gradients. It's magnet-driven, so it's very temperamental about being around metal think your phone, computer, the brackets in your desk, even the pencil ring itself when you turn it on.
You have to stay 20 cm away at all times to avoid dead spots or drifting lines. This is surprisingly hard to achieve in our regular use, and became an annoying factor. Even when we were far enough away from magnetic metals, it missed some strokes and added others. It's also tricky to switch between the included pen and whatever tool you have the pencil ring around. If you really love simple pencil line drawings, it will capture those fairly well, if you can keep away from any magnetic distractions.
The NewYes offers a lot of the same features as its competitors, but it doesn't deliver the same standard of performance. Like most of the pens that use your phone to record audio, it does it as well as your phone can.
And when you play the recording, the app replays your note writing in real-time. Alongside the record button are editing tools to add to or erase your notes. At first, they are easy to get wrong, and we accidentally erased a large portion of a page before we got used to them. When taking notes, the pen lets you bounce around your notebook like the top-tier options; however, it's not flawless.
One of our sentences found its way into the middle of our drawing test. It is fairly accurate if you hold it correctly, but real-world use proved that difficult to maintain. This pen is just so darn hard to write with. It's a slippery, cumbersome triangle, and to capture text correctly, you have to hold it fairly upright.
In fairness, when held straight up and down, the pen is easier to hold, but it's not natural. Writing with our type-trained hands is hard enough. This alone ruined the NewYes for our testers. The app can also feel glitchy. Unlike its competitors, it doesn't automatically sync any notes you took while offline, and it's not intuitive to figure out how to do so manually.
Sharing data is also harder. We even found it difficult to turn this pen off, you have to replace the cap just right, and there is no good guidance for how to do so. The other options do it better. For the seven years that Clark Tate has been writing for a living, and the six she spent as a restoration ecologist and coordinator before that, the woman has taken a lot of notes and ripped through a scary stack of notebooks.
She's always torn between the storage benefits of typing notes and the joys of leaving home without a laptop and taking breaks to draft handwritten articles sprinkled with sand on remote beaches.
She's pretty much been dreaming about digital pens her entire life and couldn't wait to get her well-developed writing hands on a large selection of them at once.
As a journalist, she uses a toolbox of devices to record phone calls and interviews and demands seamless tech — because the robots should work for us, not the other way around.
To test these pens, our write-happy testing team toted them to all of our favorite outdoor scribbling spots. For weeks we took notes during meetings, conference calls, and interviews. We drew and journaled and packed the pens up in bags to see how they handled themselves in the real world.
To test accuracy, we 1 wrote out Maya Angelou's famous poem "Still I Rise" in our normal, sloppy handwriting, converted it to text, and counted the number of missed words, 2 did the same for a short Hafiz of Shiraz poem that we wrote carefully and clearly. Smart pens have been evolving rapidly over the last decade.
Many have fallen behind the tech curve while others continue to rise to the occasion. Here we explain what we learned about how accurately they convert our scribbles to text, how easy they are to use, and how long their batteries hang in there. Overall, these are super useful tools when in the right hands. These pens are, for the most part, good at picking up pen strokes. All of the award-winning options transfer your writing and art faithfully. In contrast, the Moleskine didn't earn top marks because it cut out a line or two of our art challenge, whereas the iskn lost points for adding a few.
What we mean by accuracy is how well each pen's app digitizes your writing and how well it translates your writing into text.
This has a lot to do with how easy it is to use your pen correctly. If it's hard to maintain the orientation and angle necessary for the pens to properly capture your handwriting or drawing, accuracy will suffer. We break down how easy each pen is to hold and wield in the next section; here, we're just talking results. The Livescribe Symphony earns top marks here. It perfectly recorded our drawings and only missed a few words here and there in the transcription tests, even the one where we wrote in our normal read: terrible hand scribbles.
The top performers missed no more than five words in our transcription accuracy tests. It offers no text transcription and does not consistently capture all pencil or pen strokes for either drawing or writing. The better handwriting you have, the more accurately your words, drawings, and charts will be recorded. This can be challenging in our keyboard culture. Luckily our testers are analog and like putting pen to paper.
We wrote out notes for weeks to find out that some of these smart pens are much easier to hold and move with precision than others.
The Rocketbook works very well in this regard. It's as simple to use as a regular marker. As a bonus, you don't have to worry about this one getting wet, breaking, or holding a charge. They are round, like regular pens, and easy to hold. Of them, the finish on the Symphony is the most pleasant.
With all that said, if you're looking for a combination smart pen and audio recorder, the Livescribe Echo is still a fine choice. The Repaper Tablet successfully combines pencil and paper with digital drawing at a very reasonable price. The special magnetic technology of the Repaper Ring means you can slip it onto a pencil of your choice and draw directly onto paper that you secure to the A5-sized tablet space. We were impressed with how well the pressure sensitivity worked, allowing us to control how thick and thin we wanted our lines to be.
Both the Repaper Tablet itself and the free Repaper Studio app have clean, simple designs that make them intuitive to use for both adults and kids. The app is also compatible with many other software programs, such as Adobe Photoshop or Gimp for more extensive editing.
As an added bonus, the Repaper Tablet also works well with Microsoft Whiteboard and Google Jamboard, so it makes live broadcasting and giving online presentations on Zoom or Teams super simple.
Smart pens are also better than dictaphones or voice recorders for a lot of people as writing down notes actually helps some people to learn and retain information better than just hearing it spoken aloud. While there are many great features that make smart pens worth owning, they do also have a few downsides that are worth considering.
Finally, smart pens are usually a lot heavier than normal pens, which makes them uncomfortable to write with over long periods of time. This means they feel weird to write with, when compared to traditional pens. The short answer here is: yes. On a basic level, smart pens not only allow students to take notes more effectively and to suggest changes when transferring to digital, but the voice recording function also allows people to recap their notes at a later stage, and make any corrections they need.
According to a study done at Raynooth University in Ireland, almost all students with learning disabilities managed to show improvement after periods of using smart pens vs regular pens. While there's undoubtedly a vested interest, LiveScribe list their smart pens as being able to help students with dyslexia on their website, and many others promote the virtues of this smarter, and multifaceted, form of note taking.
The smart pens we tested digitize handwritten notes and drawings and send them wirelessly to mobile apps on a phone or tablet. If you prefer sketching or taking notes on mobile devices by touching a pen directly to the touchscreen surface instead of to a conventional notepad, a stylus is the best option. Here are some of our favorite styluses for mobile devices. Apple Pencil 2nd Generation. The Apple Pencil syncs and transmits positioning data to your iPad via a Bluetooth signal.
This might seem like a needlessly complicated way to make sure it only works on Apple devices, but in reality this system allows for much more sensitive data collection. When you draw on the pressure-sensitive screen with the side of the tip, it creates wide strokes perfect for shading.
Adonit makes a huge range of styluses that work with a much broader range of devices than the Apple Pencil, so this might be your best bet if you have an older device.
It offers palm rejection, pressure sensitivity and tilt support, which makes it ideal for artists who want to draw in normal, comfortable positions without worrying about their hand leaving marks on their drawing. Luke is a veteran tech journalist with decades of experience covering everything from TVs, power tools, science and health tech to VPNs, space, gaming and cars.
You may recognize him from appearances on plenty of news channels or have read his words which have been published in most tech titles over the years. In his spare time of which he has little as a father of two Luke likes yoga, surfing, meditation, DIY and consuming all the books, comics and movies he can find. Jump to: Best smart pens Smart Pen Advice. Find the best smart pens below Best smart pens 1. Livescribe 3 Smart Pen: Best smart pen overall. Livescribe 3 Smartpen. Superb accuracy, and a wealth a features make this pen the best.
Reasons to avoid - Heavier than most smart pens - Requires expensive Livescribe notebooks. Wacom Bamboo Folio Smartpad. Reasons to avoid - Paper must be aligned with the smartpad - Short battery life. Pioneering Smartpens We found that in this ever changing technological landscape, constantly switching between written and typed notes can be frustrating.
Our lightest, slimmest smartpen yet. Designed to feel like a pen, but to do so much more. Giving a new dimension to your notes, by harmonising audio and script. The bridge between audio and script. Writing, recording and repeating. You can have a parrot on your back, or you can have the Echo in your hand. The Smartpen.
0コメント