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General discussion

Handwritten Notes

by jb1540 Jun 17, 2014 9:11AM PDT

I've seen a few posts of people asking about capable stylus-wielding note taking tablets for under some specific price point. I've also paid a lot of attention to the soon to be launched surface pro 3... Obviously the price point is a sticking point, but neglecting price, is there a better option for taking handwritten notes on a tablet?
The 12" Samsung tablet seems to be the next closest thing, but people said the processor performance was sub-par... plus I like the benefit of platform consistency. Are there other, next best options? Is note taking in, say, a math-heavy engineering class practical on a tablet, if the pen/screen is pretty responsive and accurate? Does the windows environment provide better support for such note-taking (i.e. notes to text or notes to math conversion, or app options) than android, or vice-versa? Just curious if there are opinions out there, since the price for the surface pro 3 is a little steep, but it seems like Windows has really nailed the note-taking aspect of things with the revised stylus, notepad-esque size and natural-ish writing feel, and the ultra thin screen stack. If there are other comparable options for less, I'd be interested to hear.

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3 Posts
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My question.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Jun 17, 2014 9:14AM PDT

Have you used such before? I find it to fail in so many ways. I'm back to paper, pens and to digitize I take a photo.

If you want to see fairly good note taking (still not good enough IMO) try the models with pens. Samsung S-pen and Microsoft's latest.
Bob

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Thanks for the reply
by jb1540 Jun 17, 2014 9:40AM PDT

No, I haven't tried it, and it seems like you opinion is the dominant one overall. I've done some of the using a photo to digitize thing, but it seems like you can't do much with text or math recognition from a photo, or at least oneNote 2010 didn't handle photographed notes well in that regard. When I first saw the work Microsoft put in to making the pen viable on the SP3, I got pretty excited about the idea of searchable notes and automatic conversion to text. Would be awesome if it works well.

Just curious, could you list a couple of the biggest reasons taking notes with a stylus isn't practical? Is it technical failure, like accuracy and whatnot?

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For me it's the feel. Maybe with time I could get better but
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Jun 17, 2014 10:01AM PDT

There's a trap in that you may end up perfecting the page like folk do in Word processors. At times you must just type to get the words out and the same goes for notes. There are tomes on the web about note taking and the tablet pens IMO are not optional.

Beyond that, you catch the makers writing things like "No. Using Evernote's API only for the OCR capabilities is a violation of the API License Agreement."

What? You mean that software is artificially limited because of the License? I think Richard Stallman had it right.
Bob

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