Ask Slashdot: What's a Good Tablet/App Combination For Note-Taking?

EmagGeek writes "My wife recently started back to school to finish her 4-year degree, and one of the things that we've been considering is procuring for her some kind of tablet that would enable her to take notes in class and save them electronically. This would obviate the need to carry around a bunch of paper, and could even be used to store e-textbooks so she doesn't have to lug 30lbs of books around campus. At minimum, she would have to be able to write freehand on the tablet with a fine-point stylus, just like she would write on paper with a pen. We've seen what we call those 'fat finger' styli and found that they are not good for fine writing. Having become frustrated with the offerings we've tried so far, I thought I would ping the Slashdot Community. Any suggestions?"

Comments

Re:NoteOne

[Mr. Pibb]

Don't even think of clicking.. goatse alert. Way to get me fired, bro

Evernote, blue tooth keyboard/case combo.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just finishing a graduate program and my iPad and bluetooth keyboard/case combo have definitely made the long treks across campus easier. Evernote is fantastic for note taking and it has a feature that allows you to record audio... great for snagging lectures and random professor rants. Evernote syncs what you write/record to the cloud which has allowed me to have access to my materials anywhere. And I haven't lost a note yet!

Word of warning: If she is going to use a tablet for taking notes, the external keyboard is a must. Before I picked mine up, my wrists were aching after even short typing sessions in class.

Re:Evernote, blue tooth keyboard/case combo.

[DarenN]

Use some kind of tablet/e-reader for your books, but use paper to take notes. Physical writing has several advantages, not least that the act of writing aids recall later. You take notes in class, and refine them and tidy them afterwards - this serves the double purpose of going over the content twice, and having to understand it better to condense it for the notes you store. Messing with multiple pens, or using a device in class disrupts your concentration and hence makes everything harder than it needs to be.

Memory, recall and learning (understanding concepts) are fairly complex and everyone's slightly different. The above is my own take on it.

If you go that way, the Kindle works quite well for displaying papers (with graphs and the like) although there's no colour for diagrams. I find that the grey background and no back-light with black text is easier on your eyes particularly if you'll be studying those books intensively over a longer period. This is a concern because as your eyes get tired it affects the rate at which you can take things in and you will need more frequent breaks or lose concentration. Anything with a reflective screen should be right out - the shine if the lights are on can make it difficult to read. Don't pick something too bright either, you'll distract those around you!

Best of luck to your wife

Old School

[2names]

A pen and some paper. This method is proven to increase later recall of the subject matter. [too lazy to provide citation]

Re:Old School

[godrik]

and you write and annotate much faster on paper. If you want to keep electronic tracks of what you are doing, you can always take pictures of it. I take pictures of my white board all the time, and that works well for me.

Computer note taking is painful in my opinion.

Re:Old School

[ackthpt]

A pen and some paper. This method is proven to increase later recall of the subject matter. [too lazy to provide citation]

Too right. I summarise as I'm writing. Often adding my own thoughts in a column, include some small sketches, lines, arrows, etc. Generally I have found, it I take good enough notes, I don't usually have to go back over them, unless I'm a bit uncertain on something - then I use the notes (which may include such marvelous comments as "*research this item*") only as a brief review.

Re:Old School

[ColdWetDog]

Paper - means trees, or if recycled paper is used, tracks to deliver, and rest that you can imagine. Pens - chemicals. And then to save notes - you'll scan or retype it?

Go around and watch closely how much paper / trees you use a day. Particularly at lunch. Then look at the couple of pieces of paper you would use to take notes.

Then get some perspective.

thinkpad iPad.

[Tragek]

If handwriting is desired, I generally would recommend against an iPad. I've been using one with a stylus, and the non-intelligent screen just doesn't work well enough.

A friend of mine has a convertible X-series thinkpad, and it's great for them, with intelligent built in stylus + OneNote.

Re:Recording

[BlackSnake112]

Maybe because faculty do not want to be recorded? When I was in school I did ask to record the classes. Most of the faculty were against it. This was 20 years ago (dam I am old) it might be different today. I would ask before recording class.

None

[Manip]

No tablet as exists today are incapable of taking good usable notes, or if they are (Microsoft OneNote running on a Samsung Series 7 with Windows 7) then they certainly won't exceed a regular laptop with a keyboard. People love to claim the technology is up to that stage but as someone who has foolishly wasted more money that I would like to admit on the tablet dream, I can tell you that, no, you're just wasting money.

The "main issue" I've found is two things, first off handwriting recognition is crap. Secondly that even when it works there isn't any real integration with the rest of the system, so the resulting text and diagrams is an uncategorised orphan unusable by anything of use.

Android and iOS are great consumers of content but they're terrible producers. The software is lacking, the interface designs are arse-backwards, and all it ultimately results in is an inefficient irritating system that you might have well not use. Things like the Android Transformer almost prove my point for me by opting for a keyboard and Microsoft Word-clone like software to increase your productivity. If the fact that the best Android can do is to copy a "normal" laptop then that is as damning of a statement of the state of tablets as I can tell.

ADF Scanner and notepad

[jbeaupre]

You don't have to give up on paper. If you are also thinking of getting a printer as part of going back to school, try getting a combination printer/scanner with an auto document feeder. I'm happy with our Canon Pixma 420 (around $100). It's pretty quick to scan 50 pages to PDF.

If her handwriting is decent, it'll even OCR it for her.

If she likes 4x8 notepads, those will scan and display decently on even a Kindle.

If this cheap alternative doesn't work, you still have a decent printer and can still get something digital.

Re:thinkpad iPad.

[TheSeventh]

The Lenovo tablet was designed to enable note taking, with an intelligent stylus that communicates with the tablet, and handwriting recognition software as well. My girlfriend has one and likes it quite a bit:

http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/tablet/thinkpad/

Not all text

[pavon]

Unless she is getting her degree in the humanities, there will be parts of the lecture that include equations, graphs, and diagrams that are hard to input with a keyboard. Nothing beats handwriting for that sort of content.

Re:Not all text

[martas]

"professor, could you pause for 25 minutes while I peruse 10 different Latex boards to figure out how to create a \lessgtr with symbols both above and below?"

Re:Not all text

[hism]

Statements like these make me embarrassed to be in the sciences for two reasons. First, for asserting that people in my discipline believe that there's nothing worthy in human knowledge in the humanities; and second, for suggesting that people in the sciences are just doing it for the earning power. These statements demonstrate a narrow perspective of the world. And speaking of that, I'd like to point out that there are plenty of countries where it is fully possible to get an education without "enormous undischargeable debt."

Livescribe Pen

[GreyyGuy]

A Livescribe pen would let her take notes like normal and record the lecture. Plus Livescribe will also let you take notes for all your classes in one notebook, and then you can sort the notes into individual classes ion the computer. So only one notebook to carry around at a time. AND the notes can then be put into PDF or loaded into Evernote so you can read them on whatever device you want. Easy and familiar to use to record information and easy to sort it and use the notes later. I love mine for notes in meetings and my own projects!

Re:iPad with a keyboard?

[bizard]

I use an iPad with a bluetooth keyboard as well as a pen. For general lectures or notes in a class where there are few equations, the keyboard is great. For a few figures or equations I can zoom in and draw with my finger (in the same notebook app that I am typing in) or even quickly google the figures I see in the presentation and paste them directly into my notes. For my cosmology class, heavy on general relativity, I find that I can't type the equations fast enough and so switch to an app which has fantastic stylus response. Both apps allow exporting as PDF (among other things) and so for classes where I use both notebooks, I export to PDF and merge the pages in the proper order.

Apps: iNotes (typing with light figure work) and NoteShelf (fantastic pen work with Griffen pen). The 'fatness' of the stylus is not an issue and for particularly fine writing you can write in a 'zoomed' area and have it appear on the page at a smaller size. The app also recognizes your wrist as opposed to where you are writing so that you can just write directly on the page. They also have lousy screenshots on their website...the control you have over line shape is superb. Both apps allow organizing your notes in different notebooks so that you can separate out your classes.

The one thing I would still like is a better app for general note taking. iNotes is fine for typing but the drawing tools are rather limited. A previous app that I used, Notify, was fantastic until it crashed 45 minutes into a class taking all of my notes with it. Both iNotes and NoteShelf have been stable and I have never lost any notes.

Re:Recording

[Big Smirk]

My best notes were actually in pen.... more precisely a multi-colored pen. Black for subject headings, blue for text, green for examples, red for important stuff. I have very good memory recall for things like that and it worked well for me. A combination of actually writing down the notes, plus a vivid image in my head what the notes looked like, I found it really easy to recall exactly where in my notes a subject was covered.
The problem I have with electronic note taking is that I have little concept on approximately where in my notes something is.. Was it on page 10, 20 or 30? With a physical notepad, I always had a rough idea.
Of course I'm older, and my brain never grew up on I-pads.

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Don't take notes

[ShavedOrangutan]

I found it to be more useful to do all the day's reading ahead of class and then don't bother taking any notes. Just listen and pay attention. And ask questions.

Before that, I'd go in clueless and spend the whole class furiously taking notes. I'd miss major points and then go home with incomplete notes that I'd never have time to review anyways.

Probably that and learning how to prioritize are how I went from nearly flunking out to a 4.0 on an overload schedule.