Digital pen lives up to its promise

This futuristic gadget really lives up to its promise.  The Livescribe Pulse Smartpen creates digital copies of your handwritten notes -- but it also records audio and ties it to the stroke of your Smartpen. So, for example, if you're jotting notes in a meeting and leave out an essential word, no worries.  Later, print out your notes and play the simultaneously-recorded audio to hear what was said at that moment.

Here's how it works:  The Smartpen contains an infrared cam that reads micro-dots on special paper provided by Livescribe (you can buy more or even print your own).  The sessions automatically copy to the computer when the pen is set on a USB charging cradle.

Not only is this thing useful, it has some very cool features worth noting. Draw a calculator keypad and tap through math problems. Draw a piano keyboard, label each note, then "play" tunes by tapping the keys, with rhythm tracks and voices like steel drum or marimba. Translation mode (available mid-2009) reads your written English and translates to other languages (demo lists Spanish, Mandarin, Swedish, or Arabic), giving the correct pronunciation over the Pulse's speaker. Add-on software transcribes handwriting into text.

And for Mac users, great news:  the Smartpen is now available for you, too.

--Bill Pfleging, gadget geek