In what would seem to be a felicitous merging of the analog and digital, Livescribe has just announced its Pulse smartpen. I can hear you groan, but wait. These folks have dedicated many years and a cool $150 million to the perfection of this baby, which is no less than an open source platform for what is essentially a computer in the shape of a pen. The interesting twist is that the pen not only captures handwriting but also simultaneous audio. Users write normally on paper that has been printed with micro-dots, resulting in "live" documents that are connected to what is being recorded. So at any time you can just click on what you've written and the pen will jump to that part of the recording, with controls on the paper providing navigation capabilities. Notes and audio can be uploaded to a PC, where they can be replayed, saved, searched, converted to Flash and sent.

Interesting enough, but the open nature of the pen's operating system has already attracted developers, who are readying applications for translation, math and text conversion, among others. The pen comes in two models, with the higher-end one supplied with 2 GB of memory, enough to capture 100 hours of recording or 16,000 pages of notes, as well as run more complex applications. Price? A rather reasonable $199. More info is available on the Livescribe site, with pre-ordering for March delivery possible on the slightly strange Livescribe Institute site.