I have something similar... it's called Paperium (http://paperium.com/) and it's very similar to Livescribe. It uses the same type of paper (probably not the exact pattern) and I think all these pens with camera + special dotted paper are using the same licensed tech from Hitachi. Paperium also has special areas where you can point with a pen and send stuff over bluetooth over to your computer. Bluetooth connectivity was the reason why I didn't consider other USB pens (Livescribe seems to be USB). It gives you feedback as a series of short vibrations. Once it's on your computer, you can do all kinds of things including change the thickness, change the level of smoothing of the lines, export to Illustrator etc. This is all easy since the pen captures the vector data.

I've also started using Evernote which is this cool app that allows you to archive and search stuff within notes, pictures etc. It works really, really well. Even though I have a writing style of an old doctor, it recognizes my writing just fine.

The audio features of Livescribe don't appeal to me much but whatever works for you..

Paperium has solved my throwaway paper napkin doodlings problem quite nicely. I used to take a pic of my sketches/explanations with my phone and send it around that way but this is so much better. Can't recommend this type of tech enough!

Ok - yet another licensee of Anoto. Not sure why people haven't yet seen one or the other incarnation of this technology. LeapFrog had a product out one or two years ago. There was a startup at DEMO this year selling a product for students. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoto

Paper Replay is absolutely amazing.

http://livescribe.com/smartpen/videos.html

The SmartPen itself is only $150... 4-pack of notebooks is $20. Experiencing GAS - gear acquisition syndrome.

The SmartPen is really cool. Unfortunately, it works on Windows only. No Mac support (yet), not even Parallels compatible. http://livescribe.com/smartpen/techspecs.html

Now all they need to do is add a wireless transmitter, and give these out in U.S. embassies... The price was what amazed me - I knew this was possible, but at that price? Pretty cool.

Why couldn't the headline be "lifescribe pen" or something like that? Editors?

More descriptive headlines would increase the value of news.yc greatly.

Can you do handwriting recognition with this pen?

Well, you can run arbitrary code on the device, so sure. I assume you can also upload images recorded on the device to a real computer, so double sure.

The coolest thing from JavaOne had to be getting Effective Java 2nd edition. Being able to meet the Guice guys was also great.