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PDAs as a College Notebook?

Posted by Cliff on from the obsoleting-the-backpack dept.

Eugene asks: "G'day everyone! Here's the deal, I study Engineering in college and therefore, I have to write down LOTS of mathematical formulae and such. Now I heard that students of Law/English/etc. find great use of various PDAs as a notebook replacement(that's pen&paper notebook). I'd like to know if there's a PDA software-solution for quickly writing down math expressions( Something like the equation editor shipped with MS-Word - but if possible with a more intuitive way of entering data). All I could find so far are lots of calculators, that do little in the way of easily entering equations and storing them for later review." Well, that would be one less thing to lug around in the ole backpack. Now if we could only get textboox in digital form...

4 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Basically, no. by fm6 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Questions like this make up for all the lame "where is the power button" questions in Ask Slashdot. Cliff, please note. The difference between this question and the kind we all complain about is that it touches on issues way outside the asker's problem.

    To wit: where the fuck is our electonic paper already? I've wanted it ever since I saw Captain Kirk using an computer tablet some 35 years ago.

    PDAs aren't it. Except for a few people who can do 40 WPM without concentrating using Fitalystamp or something similar, there's no practical input for plain text, never mind math. And how can you possibly keep track of your notes on such a small display? (Even the Newton was too small for this purpose. And of course too big to put in your pocket. The worst of both worlds.)

    IBM was on the right track with the Thinkpad 700, which folded flat so you could use an electronic stylus instead of the keyboard. Alas, the 486 processor just wasn't up to serious character recognition, and IBM abandoned this option in later Thinkpads.

    (The Transnote is interesting, but I don't quite like the idea of having a separate input device.)

    Here's what would make Captain Kirk smile. Somebody comes out with a mass produced pad device. Minimum requirements:

    • At least VGA-resolution display
    • Stylus input
    • Enough processing power and RAM to do serious handwriting recognition
    • Mass storage of some kind (hard disk uses too much juice, but anything else is probably too expensive)
    • Some kind of comm/expandability option. USB 2 would suffice.
    That's it. Don't waste money on a color display -- I'm not going to use it to display graphics. And most of all, don't waste a lot of R&D money on software development. Leave that to the hackers. We've all seen what they can do if you just give them the right platform!

    Ok, what about something now? Well, if you can't spring for a Transnote, there's always the Crosspad, which was an attempt to market the Transnote's input device as a separate product. No longer in production, but you can get them on ebay for about $150.

  2. What about a small laptop? by nbvb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That really-small, really-cool Sony Vaio device comes to mind... or even an Apple iBook....

    You could also look into something like the HP palmtops, or, dare I say it, the Newton.

    This is really what the Newton could have become, if it had been given a chance. The problem was that it was waaaaay too ahead for its time!

    --NBVB

    1. Re:What about a small laptop? by Benley · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That really-small, really-cool Sony Vaio device comes to mind... or even an Apple iBook....

      I've got one of those really-small really-cool Sony Vaio devices of which you speak (an sr27k which I got free after Sony borked my previous sr7k in the shop), and I must say I *really* like the thing. I've taken it to a bunch of classes, and my notes are a lot better because of it. I type a whole lot faster and more accurately than I can write, as I'm sure a lot of other people do - the keyboard on this thing is pretty conducive to fast typing, too.

      As for equation entry, I realised after much puzzling that doing all that in Mathematica is the best way to do it. It took me a while to get good at it, but after I figured out all the keyboard shortcuts it got pretty easy. The real bonus is that I can actually decipher what I took down when I look at it an hour later.

      On a side note, I'm planning on trading this laptop in on an iBook soon. This one is fantastic, but it's shiny-newness has worn off for me for some reason, and that's mostly what I'm interested in. :-)

  3. I'm surprised nobody's suggested this yet by roystgnr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I did mechanical engineering with a math minor... and between that and the Linux hobby I got exposed to LaTeX pretty early. I've never owned a laptop (or a PDA with a keyboard), so I haven't tried to use it for notetaking, but I'll bet with a little practice that's what would work best. And if you decide that it doesn't work for notetaking, it's a good thing to learn anyway. It produces spiffy-looking reports, translates automatically to MathML, is the preferred submission format of most math/engineering journals, etc. You'd want a laptop with a full size keyboard, not some palmtop 2-finger typing thing, though.