The pen, once mightier than the sword, has been getting trounced by the keyboard in the computer era. Now and soon after there’s a push toward “pen-based computing” that doesn’t get very far.

But in a pop quiz of the latest crop of pens that combine ink with digital technology, at least one stands out as a useful tool and a complement to the keyboard.

All three pens I tested record what the user writes, and can transfer an image of those notes to a PC. The standout of the group is the LiveScribe Pulse, which plus records audio as you’re writing. Later, you can tap a place in your notes, and the pen will play back what it was hearing when that was written.

As you can imagine, that is something of a Holy Grail for journalists, who run around with notepads and voice recorders. A classic problem for us is finding the right place in an

audio recording without listening through the whole thing. The Pulse solves that problem.

Students additionally should pay attention to that pen. There is probably no better gadget for taking notes in class, except perhaps a Tablet PC, which allows you to write on the screen. But Tablet PCs are expensive and more difficult to use than the Pulse, which works with standard Windows PCs. You can additionally use it in a more limited fashion without a PC.

A Pulse with 1 gigabyte of memory costs $149 from LiveScribe’s Web site. A model with twice as much memory costs $199, but the cheaper model has room for 35 hours of audio at the highest quality setting, or more than 100 hours at a lower setting, so it’s a good value.

The greatest limitation of the Pulse is that it only works with special paper, preprinted with a pattern of dots. These…

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