Livescribe Pulse (Echo) smartpen Registered to someone else.

You were stumbling around the internet, saw a cool add on Facebook about this ‘Pulse smartpen’ from Livescribe, and thought it looked cool. Or, maybe you were in school and saw someone else with a really weird looking pen and asked them what it was. They told you it was a Livescribe Echo Smartpen, and showed you what it could do.

For whatever reason, you decided to pick one up for yourself. You looked in the stores, but they were pretty expensive. For a pen, 200 bucks is a hefty about to throw down. So, instead, you checked out EBay, and Amazon, and all those other sites.

But wait! You found someone selling a Pulse (Echo) smartpen (4GB Titanium? 2GB Charcoal-Blue?) for cheap! You don’t know why, but it’s your lucky day. You make the executive decision, scrounge around for the spare change (or just withdraw it from the bank) and meet up with that person.

Cash and Pulse change hands, and next thing you know, you are now the proud owner of a Livescribe Pulse Smartpen! Congrats!

You rush home and take out your new Livescribe smartpen, confirm everything’s there, and then read the Owner’s Manual. Okay, so you skim it. (RTFM, it’ll help a lot.) Then you get ready to use your Pulse (Echo) smartpen!

First you download the Livescribe Desktop, just like the manual says. Then, you get ready to play with your toy.

You jot down a few notes in the Livescribe Starter Notebook (With its odd dot matrix pattern on the background) and put your Livescribe smartpen in the cradle and a prompted to authorize the pen.

Bad news! It’s registered to someone else! What to do?!

First, let me explain why. When the Pulse (Echo) smartpen is registered, it places a certificate on the Livescribe smartpen to tell the Livescribe smartpen not to talk to any Livescribe Desktop, except the one that has the username that the registration certificate references. It’s to keep your data safe.

There are a couple things you can do in this scenario, to make your Livescribe smartpen work for you.

First, you can contact the person you bought the Pulse (Echo) smartpen off of, and explain the situation, and ask them to unlink it from their account. It should be a relatively painless process.
Or, you could also ask that they change their account name to whatever you want yours to be, and give you their password. You can change the password with little trouble, and they can recreate their account afterwards.

But, say they’re not responding, or you don’t have a way to contact them? Then, you’re going to need to contact Livescribe Customer Support (877.727.4239 – 877.SCRIBE9 or CS@Livescribe.com) and explain the situation.

They’re going to ask for the Serial Number of your Livescribe smartpen, and then they’re going to tell you they need to check with the original owner of the Pulse (Echo) smartpen. Don’t get offended, it’s just protocol, nothing personal.

Then, you get a notice a little while later that your Pulse (Echo) Smartpen has been unlinked and some instructions on how to Master Reset your Livescribe smartpen.
Done with that, you can use your Pulse (Echo) smartpen with utter freedom, the way it was meant to be used.

So, if you do get a second hand Pulse (Echo) smartpen, be sure that you’ve taken care of registration before you record important information on your Livescribe smartpen, otherwise it could be a headache and some lost data.

On a side note.You can get more information about the errors on the Livescribe Website, in their Knowledge base.

Please, be sure not to confuse the issue: 85200 – When I dock my smartpen and run Livescribe Desktop I am getting the message: This smartpen is registered to another user.

With the issue: 80301 – How do I remove a registered smartpen from the Livescribe database so someone else can register it (the smartpen was given or sold to someone else)?

One is for if you own the Pulse (Echo) smartpen already and are re-authorizing it to your computer and Livescribe Desktop, the other is if you bought the Livescribe smartpen off someone else and need to unregister it from them and to yourself.

Filed under: Desktop, Livescribe, Smartpen