GO GADGETFOR LESS THAN the price of the cheapest Mont Blanc pen (about €215 for the ridiculously named Amadeus Mini Mozart black resin model at www.penshop.co.uk), tourists, students, hacks, PAs and anyone else with something to write about can get a lot more ballpoint for their buck with Livescribe's Pulse "smart pen" (€99 at www.livescribe.com, €170 for the 1GB model on eBay).
With an infrared camera, an embedded speaker, a rechargeable lithium battery, an LED display and a USB output, you'd be advised not to use this baby to fire spitballs.
Use it like a real pen, to take notes - and, later, when you wave your pen over your words, like a magic wand, it will conjure up the audio recorded by the microphone at the moment you scribbled the lines on the paper (or a few seconds before you wrote them, to allow for reaction time).
The pen works only with Livescribe's special paper (€12.50 for four notepads, each of 100 sheets, at livescribe.com), as it tracks the pen's movement over dots embedded in the paper. Download your notes and recording to your computer.
It's almost as impressive as Brookstone's invisible-ink ultraviolet pen (about €8, www.brookstone.com), but there are still a couple of problems with the Livescribe Pulse, as any tape-dependent journo can attest to: mild background noise can make recordings inaudible, even when the microphone is close to a subject's mouth, so you'd want to make sure your subject speaks up or is amplified.
Beware, also, that the sound of a pen scratching across a notepad can be deafening during a quiet interview.
And what happens if you were doodling during the crucial sound bite? Do you have to retrace your ink smudges to find the vital quote?