I think Livescribe's model is much better than IOGear's for taking notes - you don't have to deal with moving the receiver around during class, just turn the pen on to get started (takes ~4 seconds to boot up) and then forget about it. The audio recording is also much more helpful than I expected, especially since you can archive your notebooks for posterity. Last week I wanted to review something I learned last year, so I just typed in the search and got to hear a five-minute lecture about it :)

If you're just interested in organization and searching, I'd highly recommend the LiveScribe Pulse smartpen - all the smarts are in the pen, which isn't too expensive compared to a tablet, and you can buy the compatible notebooks cheaply. All your notes get backed up to your computer when you dock your pen, it does a great job searching for a specific piece of text. My handwriting is a disaster, and I have never seen a search fail so far - I believe that it actually uses the sequence of pen motions (not just OCR on the final result) and it can tolerate some of the letters being unreadable. It has other features as well, such as recording audio (the mic has a decent gain) and syncing it with your notes. They also have an SDK and are launching an app store, so in the future you should be able to make good use of the ARM processor in the pen.

I was thinking the same thing - could they really have been serious about the 10-day DRM? It wasn't as if people's reactions were unpredictable, so I find it hard to believe that they honestly thought people wouldn't complain. As you pointed out, this seems more like a conscious "Door-in-the-face" technique than a legitimate retraction.