I used to use a livescribe pen years ago (perhaps an echo) and it wasn't very convenient. The biggest problem at that time was that handwriting recognition was utterly terrible and thus the resulting notes were completely unsearchable and there was no real convenient way to synchronize in a way that didn't perfectly match up with the notebooks (if I accidently did work on Martin-Lof randoms in the notebook for REA sets I couldn't move those two pages over to the appropriate place in a way that didn't get messed up on next sync). Not to mention the app sucked. However, both the actual writing capture and the audio capture worked quite well. My conclusion was that for me it was more a way to make my research notebooks extra cool and special and it wasn't actually useful but that had I been the sort of person who took notes at talks or classes and went back to look at them it would have been mildly useful and could have been super useful with better handwriting recognition. A pen which combined handwriting recognition with some kind of latex recognition engine would have been very useful. I'm thinking of buying another smart pen now that the tech has had some time to mature and my advice to anyone else considering this is **make your buying choice based on the app, third party tools/api, notebooks/printable paper and pen quality rather than the pen tech.** At least assuming it has basic functionality.