M1 Bluetooth Digital Pen Compatible with iOS, Android, Smartphones, Tablets, and Windows PC with Neo Studio Companion App - Black

The M1 is a great pen. It has a nice feel, writes well, uses a wide variety of ink refills (any D1, I think). I didn’t have the previous Neo Smartpen (the N2), but I have had a couple of Livescribes, and this pen is much nicer. It feels like a normal pen, and considering what’s inside , that’s quite amazing.The software is not nearly as strong. I somehow thought I was going to open the neo app on all my devices and everything would magically sync up everywhere, no matter which device I used to extract the ink from the pen. Wrong. I synced a page to the neo app on my phone, then wrote a bit more on the page and synced to my iPad. Everything I wrote since the sync to the phone was on the page in the iPad app, but everything I wrote before the sync to the phone was missing. It gets kind of complicated, but suffice it to say that I now sync ONLY with the neo app on my iPad and I’m happy. The bottom line for me is that I needed to pick one device (phone, tablet or pc) to sync the pen with. I can see my notes every where else by syncing the neo app with Evernote. (Sounds more complicated that’s it is.)In addition to Evernote you can allegedly sync notebooks to google drive, Adobe and OneNote. I don’t use Adobe, so I didn’t try that, but I didn’t succeeded in getting the notebooks synced with either OneNote or google drive. I set it up, and wheels spun, but either nothing ever showed up in google drive or OneNote, or what showed up was glitchy. The Evernote sync works very well.So why give it 5 stars, when improvements are clearly needed? Because the basic functions work EXTREMELY well. The ink recording seems to be rock solid. The neo app allows you to select and group physical pages into virtual notebooks which then sync with Evernote. You can use one physical notebook to write everything, and then organize by separate topics later and It’s EASY to do. That is a killer feature.In summary, it is a great pen. I love it. Physically it is just like a normal pen. I don’t think about it as a Smartpen when I use it. It doesn’t attract attention, and that’s all good. The software needs work, but the solid core (extract ink from pen, arrange notebooks, allow simple copying to virtual notebooks, sync with Evernote) works very well.

I purchased this pen for my son who is in college. He tried it out briefly and here's a summary of our observations.The good - we installed the software on an ipad and on a windows 10 PC. On both devices, the software accurately recorded the text/drawings we made on the special paper. Further, the audio record and playback functions worked well. Finally, the handwriting recognition feature was able to decode his messy handwriting. He decided that the pen could be useful for him.The bad - we then realized a few issues. First, there is only a limited selection of the special paper on Amazon and we found no other US retailer that stocks it. In particular, we were looking for loose leaf paper and a calendar. I can order these from overseas but the shipping cost is significant. The manufacturer provides templates on its website that I can print, but the templates have to printed on a laser color printer. In other words, the pen's utility is significantly impacted by the lack of affordable paper for it. Second, the software currently does not allow us to export notes along with the audio. Further, we cannot backup the audio files that were recorded on the ipad. So, there is a risk of loosing the audio files if my son's laptop or ipad is stolen or breaks.

This is the second Neo pen I've had problems with. The first worked for a while, then quit. I tried all the troubleshooting tips from Neo, but no go. They eventually replaced it, which took a while since it came directly from South Korea. I gave that new one to a faculty member at my university, then wanted to try out this new, sleeker version.It worked very well for a few months, now it is selectively working. I've tried everything: different notebooks, new nibs, better lighting, etc. It appears to be functioning, but when I try to sync it later I see many notes missing or partially there. I will try to get a replacement from the seller, but they will likely get me to go through the process via Korea again. Love this pen, but wish it worked more consistently!

UPDATE: The company has sent me a new pen. It's still charging so I'll update again once I get a chance to try it out, but I'm adding a star just for their customer service. Along with the new pen they included a free hardcover Professional notebook, which is just a classy move.Been using it for a while now and my rating says it all: it's just okay.When it works, it works beautifully. I take tons of notes for myself and for work, and love having two separate notebooks and being able to tag pages and review my notes by date. If I ever need to find something on one particular topic (and I've been tagging like I should) then I can just find that tag and swipe through the pages on the app.If it were simply a matter of it dropping the occasional stroke then that would be fine, but it more or less fails to work properly every single day. I'll write an entire page of notes from a phone call, then sync it back to the app and only half of the page is captured correctly (the other half is usually a mish-mash of half-strokes, partial words, and lonely letters in the middle of the page). At that point I need to write over all of my old strokes if I want to capture them in the app. Suffice it to say I don't love writing most of my notes twice. Sometimes I just can't get it to capture notes at all until I completely restart the pen, but this does happen every day. I have zero confidence anytime I write with the pen that it will accurately capture anything 100%.So... I still use it because so far capturing something, ANYTHING, even if I have to rewrite it to get it captured is worth the value of being able to recycle the pages but still have the notes to review if I need them. But man I wish the thing worked better.

This is my second shot at the Neopen M1. The first I bought stopped working after about a month, it become nearly impossible to get it to capture while writing on the N-code paper. I was asked to try several firmware upgrades as well as removing and replacing the pen in the tip, but it just wouldn't capture. So, I returned it and purchased another one and now the same thing has started to happen.I'm pretty discouraged as I've purchased a lot of n-code note books in anticipation of this being amazing, but the tech just must not be quite there. Is anyone else having this issue?**Update - still no luck with the pen. very frustrating.