I love my tablet. I specifically got one with an S-Pen for handwritten notes & diagrams. I got a "Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0 With S-Pen", perfect size & cheap enough that I wouldn't feel I'd wasted too much money if it didn't work out. But I love it & just bought another one for my parents.
It has replaced all my loose paper notes. It synchronizes handwritten notes with Evernote, so I can search across all my devices. I use it to take notes while on the phone or during web conference calls. I also use it to write notes while reading Kindle, though Kindle doesn't work in split-screen mode yet. My other uses are Pocket, Duolingo, Toodledo (to-do list), but I could do all of those on my phone. I am dying for a decent Project Management app that works on a tablet with the S-Pen.
Before that I had a Nook Color running Cyanogenmod, but I never used it except to test apps. Pocket wasn't a compelling enough use case; the S-Pen is what made a tablet compelling for me.
Another option is a Samsung tablet with an s-pen. Some people prefer it to an iPad setup.
(I just got an S7 lite, on sale). I like it a lot so far, but I've only had it for two days so I dont want to comment on using the pen until I've had the tablet for more time.)
I think my ideal environment would be more of a pen-based org mode with good handwriting recognition and editing.
I think you'd have to really, really prefer eInk to want this.
If you just want an affordable tablet with writing ability, the Samsung Galaxy Tab A With S Pen is $299 on Amazon, and it has twice the storage (16GB plus a microSD slot) and 4x the RAM (2GB vs 512MB). S Note has improved a lot with better cut/paste/resizing features, and can synchronize your notes & sketches to Evernote.
That's a beautifully designed product page though, and bonus points for including scenes from Malmö in their video.
This looks very promising, and I hope that they're able to pull it off (especially at that price point--it has enough potential that I might be willing to buy it sight-unseen for $99... heck, I'm considering putting in a pre-order already!)
Reasons that I want one:
* E-INK
* Optionally in color! (I like the blackboard aesthetic, to say nothing of green-on-black)
* Lightweight
* Long battery life
* Ability to read text files (on the dev roadmap, at least)
* Open-source firmware (in case the ability to read text files doesn't manifest itself quickly enough for my tastes, and for general hackability)
* Central place that I can keep all my notes and easily take them with me pretty much anywhere
Additional things that I probably need in order to have it be more than a fun toy:
* Responsiveness (as others have mentioned, too much lag between pen motion and stroke appearance is probably a deal-breaker, though if it only happens occasionally it's okay; my current tablet has the same problem and it's still usable for me)
* Better navigation (it seems pretty shoddy; I don't want to have to flip through a hundred pages to find a particular note... and once I do, how do I get back to the front page?)
* Hierarchical ability to group pages together (so I can keep my shopping lists in one place, my notes for classes in a different place--sets of pages grouped together by specific lecture, which are then grouped together by class--and my todo list in another place...)
Additional things that I want but don't need:
* Ability to use external keyboard to write to text files (this would be awesome, but I can also appreciate that it might go against their ethos)
* PDF and text file annotation
* Infinite paper with scroll and zoom (I'm less certain of this, though; seems like it would be great for mindmapping and stuff like that, but it also seems like it could be easy to lose things off in the middle of nowhere)
* Ability to rearrange text (rectangle/lasso select and then drag/cut/paste)
* Tactile sense of drawing on paper (This would be awesome, but my tablet works pretty well for me without it)
I've really been enjoying a remarkable tablet since I got it a few weeks ago. Great for taking notes, great for reading pdf's (and scribbling on them - which is surprisingly useful!), terrible for literally anything else.
I bought one yesterday on the strength of the pen alone. It was an impulse buy and I may return it (14 day return, no-restock-fee), but it is really, really impressive and I'm digging it. It'll also let me build a touch version of my game on a system I can also build on, which is pretty handy. I wasn't looking forward to deploying to Android ten bajillion times.
Also, oh my god is OneNote wonderful with that pen. It is so good.
Mac laptop, Windows tablet, Android phone. My digital ecosystem is confused.
I recently decided to get a Note again for the S-Pen experience, but I keep seeing the ReMarkable mentioned and I'm considering it, but I can't really justify it since I don't actually write that much, I just like the idea of having "electronic paper". What would you say about the device?
I've pretty much found my Note indispensable. The amount of crap I used to drag along to meetings (notebooks, papers, pens, etc.) is down to zero. I've gone through entire days bouncing around meeting to meeting with my portable "office" in my pocket and nothing else. I can't see going back to a non-pen-enabled device any time soon.
Every once in a while I find myself forgetting about the Note and looking for a pad of paper or a pen somewhere (because I don't have any on my desk any more) and slapping myself because I don't need those things anymore.
I've toyed with getting a Note Pro, but it's just too expensive IMHO. If it was down to within $50-100 of the same sized regular tablet I might dive in.
Bonus: killing time with FlipaClip has brought me more fun than I've had since I was 10 years old.
I have for along time carried around notebooks for note taking and journaling, because I felt the process of handwriting improve my experience of organizing my thoughts. But it was cumbersome and I ended up carrying multiple notebooks for different purposes.
Since I got the reMarkable 2 tablet it has replaced all my notebooks while retaining all the benefits of handwriting. With the added bonus of much easier organizing, backup and being able to view the notes on other devices.
I'm using a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360. Personally I love it, the large screen and large touch pad makes it great for note taking and coding. Makes it as tolerable as it gets to not be at the triple monitor desktop setup at my desk (particularly when using the S8Ultra as a second screen). The battery life has also been more than sufficient for my needs (but since it's basically for web browsing, document editing, note taking, amateur level drawing and light client for SSH'd vscode, it isn't doing much). My main criticism would be it feels a bit delicate.
I had also tried the regular Galaxy Book 3 360 for a day, but I felt the screen was a bit small and not as sharp as I'd like.
That said, since EMR pens also work in-place of S pens, I'd guess that S pens will work on any device that supports EMR pens (minus the bluetooth air gestures, those aren't available on windows laptops). For me the value was the 'ecosystem' with my other devices which also happen to be from Samsung, including the ability to share the stylus between everything.
Yeah I think it comes down to preference. I have an iPad as well and a windows tablet. Both were more than sufficient for note-taking but often times I would forget to plug them in or something and suddenly I had a dead notebook. Plus I almost never used the features that made these worth 1200+ dollars. Seemed like money I just lit on fire for a note taking tablet to be honest. The android tablets were also considered but I degoogled years ago and won't go back.
eInk leaves a lot to be desired still but the input latency on the supernote seems comparable to the iPad. I think the tactile experience is superior and for me that sacrifice was worth it. I can go a few weeks without charging my supernote and my iPad requires a charge at least once every couple days. The supernote also seems better set up for bullet Journaling and what not. It definitely is exactly as offered - a notebook replacement. Nothing more and nothing less. I find that charming.
Think of a big Kindle, good battery, and really good writing experience (much like paper). I can note on pdfs, it has handwriting recognition, exports well and is otherwise a joy to use.
I used to have a top of the line Samsung tablet before, and was never really happy with it for taking notes and reading.
The reMarkable tablet is the best innovation on pen and paper since the ballpoint pen. It's become a thinking tool more so than any other electronic device I have, and it has me daydreaming about a tablet and stylus based computing environment.
I have the best of both worlds: my Boox Note 2 is an android tablet but is a 10” e-ink Wacom note taking device too. It’s been brilliant, albeit less polished in some corners than the RM2 of course — but the note taking experience (and reading experience) is not one of them: it’s fantastically polished and performant. And got crazy good after sales support with firmware updates too to add new features to their notes and reading apps
I'm still looking for THE epaper notepad that works well for note-taking, but also reading emails, managing a calendar, etc and that is also running Android.
I've been using a Onyx Boox Note 3 for a couple years now (I previously had a Remarkable 1 but it didn't stick for me) - it has Android 10 (w/ Google Play support) and even an SDK for responsive writing for 3rd party apps. It's been great for taking notes, and adequate for reading books and papers (although even a single color for highlighting would be a huge improvement).
Note, that Onyx is notorious for violating the GPL (it doesn't release kernel sources), while reMarkable is not only compliant, but much more hacker friendly in general: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable
But there are also other companies/products Boyue Likebook, Ratta Supernote, Quirklogic Papyr, Fujitsu Quaderno that compete in the e-ink notepad space as well. I'm keeping an eye on the Bigme Carve Color personally, which basically has all the hardware specs you'd want and color (Kaleido 2) to boot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydo5FtSt_qQ
For those looking at color, it might be worth waiting a few months to see if 1) if the Reinkstone R1 is actually vaporware or not (it has an alternative DES that looks like it provides better looking color, but is being developed by a questionable Chinese company that's been best by delays) and if eInk's Kaleido 3 is a significant improvement.
It has replaced all my loose paper notes. It synchronizes handwritten notes with Evernote, so I can search across all my devices. I use it to take notes while on the phone or during web conference calls. I also use it to write notes while reading Kindle, though Kindle doesn't work in split-screen mode yet. My other uses are Pocket, Duolingo, Toodledo (to-do list), but I could do all of those on my phone. I am dying for a decent Project Management app that works on a tablet with the S-Pen.
Before that I had a Nook Color running Cyanogenmod, but I never used it except to test apps. Pocket wasn't a compelling enough use case; the S-Pen is what made a tablet compelling for me.
reply