It's always nice to see things get more powerful and cheaper at the same time. The Echo, now two years newer than the two-year old Pulse, is also designed to work with standard headphones. The charging cradle has been replaced by a cable that (unfortunately) is not a standard mini USB cable, but that's a minor flaw for an incredible product.

Ideal for augmenting an older student's note-taking abilities, the lithium-ion battery, Java-powered recorder that is just a bit fatter than a Sharpie marker, with a tiny camera in its tip that can detect a faint pattern of dots to give the pen its bearings. Without this special paper, you're left with an old fashioned, rather expensive pen, however. Here's a summary of the three biggest features:

a) It can capture everything you write and "replay" it on a Windows or Macintosh computer screen.

b) It can record large amounts of extremely clear stereo audio (up to 100 hours for the 1GB model and 200 hours for the 2 GB model).

c) It can associate written notes with the sounds that are going on, at the exact instant the marks on the page were made. So you go back to a page of old notes that you made yesterday, touch the point of the pen on a sentence or sketch, and hear that part of the lecture. For a reporter doing an Interview, this feature is a must-have. Echo is based on the Swedish Anoto dotted media technology, and it comes from the same inventor, Jim Marggraff,formerly from Leapfrog.