That I never really wished anyone a Merry Christmas on the website. I did it on the other sites, but didn’t do it on my own personal site! How rude of me!

I hope everyone had a good Christmas and got everything they wanted.

I got a couple things for Christmas that I wasn’t expecting: A Zune HD and a LiveScribe Pulse.

First, the Zune HD. This thing is truly awesome! It’s 32 gigabytes, with the most amazing screen I have ever seen on a portable media player. The videos I put onto it to test it out were from the ’80s and not the best quality, but this thing makes them look amazing! Even though the screen is kind of small, I can see everything very clearly. And the music, of course, sounds completely great through the premium headphones I got with my last Zune. (The regular headphones are good, but the premiums sound about 100 times better.)

I have downloaded all of the apps for it that were available. There aren’t that many right now, as Microsoft hasn’t opened the platform up to outside developers yet, but those that are available work seemlessly with the unit. And unlike Apple, all the apps for the Zune are FREE.

Also unlike the Apple, when I hook this unit up to my HD television, it will actuallly play HD versions of the videos!

Now, on to the LiveScribe Pulse.

Chances are you haven’t heard of it before, or if you have you probably thought it was way too much money to spend for a pen!

But it is so much more than just a pen!

I have been playing around with it for the past few days and am truly awestruck over what this pen does!

First, it has a built-in voice recorder, so it will record whatever is being said around you. This is something that would come in handy during school to record the classes. But a simple digital voice-recorder would be fine for that. What makes the LiveScribe better than just a regular voice recorder?

Well, the LiveScribe also has a computer built into it. The reason for this is that the LiveScribe not only records sound, but when used with the specially designed paper, it also records everything you write and draw, and then matches what was written to what audio was recorded!

This works in the best way!

Let’s say I am sitting in class taking notes on the theory of relativity. I am recordiing the class as I am taking the naotes. When he starts to speak, I write down “relativity” on my notepad, and then wait for a few minutes and write the word “Einstein” onto the pad. When I go back later and review my notes, I place the tip of the pen to the word “relativity” and the pen starts to play back what was being said at that time. If I then move directly to “Einstein” it will skip those few minutes of recorded sound and go straight to what was being said as I wrote “Einstein.”

I admit, I talked to myself for over 40 minutes the other day, writing as I did so on the special pad and then went back and the pen played back what I was saying at the time I wrote the notes. It was just too cool!

And the best part: It took up very little space on the 4 gigabytes chip in the pen!

Once I am done with those notes, I can then download all of the notes and the audio to my computer using the LiveScribe Desktop software and remove them from the pen to free up more space. And the software works the same way as the pen, so if I need to review notes again later on the computer, all I have to do is click on a word with my mouse and it will play the associated audio.

While I LOVE my Zune HD, and think it is possibly the best yet in the Zune line-up, I am even more impressed and pleased with the LiveScribe Pulse. This is going to make my note-taking and studying that much more easy for me!