XNote Smart Pen & Notebook Starter Set – AI-Powered Digital Note Taking, Real Paper Writing Syncs to App, Bluetooth Smart Notebook, 17-Hr Battery, Official Bundle with 5 Ink Refills

Digital Note Taking Smart Pen and Notebook Set by Xnote
This digital pen and notebook does an excellent job of instantly transferring notes to your device, the pen writes very well using real ink, works with drawings/images as well as writing, has an impressive battery life, and the extra AI tools can be helpful under the right circumstances. However, this does require you use a proprietary notebook in order to work.*** MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A COMPATIBLE DEVICE BEFORE YOU PURCHASE AS NOT ALL DEVICES OR OPERATING SYSTEMS WILL WORK! ***I am using this with my iPhone 15 Pro and it works perfectly. It is very easy to set up as all you need to do is charge the pen and download the app. Once you pair your pen to the app and run through the set up, you really are ready to go. It’s incredible that the app automatically recognized and setup the notebook as soon as I started writing in it. It even knows which page you are writing on and the page numbers are written at the bottom of each page in the notebook. The pen has great battery life and can be charged using a USB-C cable.*** TIP: if it looks like your pen isn’t being recognized, make sure you are looking at the correct page. You also need to have the app open and running for the pen to sync your writing to your device ***As the tip mentions, unfortunately, you must have your device and the app open and running in order for this to work. It will not register and sync anything you write during a later time as everything is transferred instantaneously. In other words, you can’t write something in the notebook with your device turned off, come back later, open the notebook, and have what you wrote earlier transfer at a later time. This really is one of the major draw backs to this device.Another draw back is the proprietary notebooks that are required. Each notebook page has thousands of tiny little dots that allow the pen to use the camera to record and map your writing. That means you can’t just use any old piece of paper. At the time of this review, a single “Xnote Large Smart Notebook” sells for $39.00 or a set of small, medium, and large “Smart Notebook Bundle” sells for $69.00. This means, if you want to utilize this device, you will want to be efficient and smart with your note taking, otherwise you will need to dish out a lot of money just for the writing paper. Also, you will need to use their ink refills. A pack of 5 sells for $12.00, but thankfully, this includes 5 extra refills so you should not need to worry about buying ink.Finally, you do get AI support through the app. This can summarize what you wrote, help you search for key words you’ve written in your notebook, and even translate things into different languages. It can also transform your writing into word processed notes that you can then use in any word processor.Overall, this transfers what you write to a digital devices with amazing accuracy. This can really help with note taking, but I have also found it very helpful with my job when I’m on the phone with clients. I can quickly scribble down quick notes and numbers and have them be instantly transcribed into digital notes which I can then copy and paste into a WORD document.The fact that you can only use this with the device and app running is definitely irritating, and knowing that you must use a proprietary notebook (that are expensive to replace) is also irritating, but the results do speak for themselves. If you need something to instantly transfer your writing to digital notes, then this simply works.BONUS: Excellent for artists as well for scribbling rough drafts.

Impressive handwriting recognition
This is an interesting piece of technology which combines a real-time writing import system with AI-trained handwriting recognition. My handwriting is a scrawl which normally only I can read, although I do tend to use capital letters to make it easier. The smart pen records my handwriting exactly as written in the notebook, which it will store locally (although not more than a few pages at most) or import directly to the phone app over bluetooth. The app can then send the handwriting image to the XNote AI system to be converted to text, summarized, etc.The only downside is that the pen relies on a camera, which in turn relies on the specialized paper in notebooks that can only be purchased from XNote. It is otherwise just a normal pen when writing on any other paper, and it cannot scan any handwriting. XNote offers a few different sizes of lined notebooks, but you will be limited to their product ecosystem. Pen tip refills must also be purchased from XNote, and while the kit includes 5 refills, the nature of the pen means you’ll need more. They’re rather small pen nibs as well, in order to fit the complex electronics in the pen one assumes, so my guess is that those 5 refills will likely last roughly long enough to fill up the included notebook.The system is impressively functional, but these are things to keep in mind.