Livescribe's Pulse "smart" pen gets its own app store

The brilliant, voice-recording Pulse Smartpen—the one that lets you tap anywhere on your notes to hear what was being said at that exact moment—will get a little smarter Thursday with the arrival of its new app store. Also: Keep your eyes peeled for an eventual wireless version of the Pulse.

The new storefront, which goes into beta today, will be a modest affair at first—just a couple dozen apps or so, ranging anywhere from 99 cents to $99, according to Livescribe founder and CEO Jim Marggraff.

But Livescribe is hoping to stock its new store with "hundreds" of apps in the coming months, Marggraff told me, running the gamut from calculators and dictionaries to handwriting transcription programs and even simple games, like video poker and Blackjack.

Don't know what a Pulse pen is? No problem: It's a pen (natch) with two to four gigs of built-in flash memory, a voice recorder, a one-line LED display, and an infrared sensor on its tip. As you record and take notes, the Pulse pen keeps track of what's being said as you write; then, when you go back to review your notes, you can just tap a word with your pen, and you'll hear (via the Pulse's built-in speaker or the included earbuds) what was being said at that precise moment.

Pretty cool, so what's the catch? Well, the Pulse's relatively high sticker price ($169 for the 2GB model, or $199 for the 4GB version), you'll need Livescribe's "dot" paper—that is, paper that's been printed with teeny, tiny "microdots" that allow the pen's infrared sensor to track its position on the page. You can print "dot" paper yourself on a 600dpi laser-jet printer, or you can buy pads of the paper from Livescribe. (A three-subject, 150-page notebook of lined dot paper sells for $8.)

So no, the Pulse pen isn't particularly cheap, but Livescribe's Marggraff says he hopes to see the pens selling for as cheap as $50 at some point—with a little help, he hopes, from revenue from the new app store.

What kind of apps are we talking about, given that the Pulse's display is so tiny? Well, some of them are pretty basic, no question. "Classical Music Snippets" plays short clips from your favorite classical music composers; just write, say, "Beethoven" or "Mozart," then choose the piece you'd like to hear from the on-screen menu. Also on the basic side: "World Series Champions," which spits out the winners, scores, and MVPs for all past World Series matchups. Ho, hum.

Other apps are more powerful, though, such as MyScript, a Livescribe desktop app that'll transcribe your scribbles into a text file (now that could come in handy, especially for cursive-challenged bloggers like me), or the on-board American Heritage Spanish-to-English dictionary. Also cool: "Guitar Chords," an app that lets you draw a set of six strings on your dot paper, add a chord or two, and then "strum" the strings with your pen.

Games are also present and accounted for. Example: Video Poker, an app that lets you play a hand by drawing five small circles (one for each card in your hand), along with "Deal" and "Bet" buttons, on your dot paper. Tap "Deal" for your cards (which appear on the Pulse's tiny display), then tap the circles corresponding to the cards you want to hold; tap Deal again for new cards, or Bet to up the ante. Pretty clever.

The most expensive app, for now, is the $99 "Magic Yap" app that'll help you (or your kids) prep for a Bar or Bah Mitzvah; just tap a Hebrew phrase on the pre-printed dot paper to hear the words spoken by a rabbi, then record your own attempts and compare with just a few taps. 

The Livescribe app store has a ways to go before it even approaches the depth of, say, the Apple App Store, the Android Marketplace, or even Palm's meager App Catalog. Then again, those app stores are for phones, and this is a pen—a $200 "smart" pen, mind you, but still, the Pulse is the first stylus I'm aware of that gets its own collection of apps.

That said, Marggraff seems optimistic that developers will take to Livescribe's free SDK, which went out of beta a couple of months ago. (Livescribe keeps 35 percent of the revenue from its app store, Marggraff said.)

At the end of the day, of course, the Pulse pen's killer app is still its primary function: the ability to tap anywhere on your notes to hear what was being said that instant.

Speaking of the pen itself, Marggaff let slip an interested tidbit during our meeting last week: a wireless version of the Pulse pen is definitely on the drawing board, although "I have no timeline for that," he said.

A wireless Pulse pen could transfer your notes wirelessly back to your desktop, or—even better—let you (for example) draw a weather icon and get a live weather report over the air. Cool.