[Q] Best note taking tablet?

Tine17 said:

Hi,
I am going to buy myself first tablet and I need some suggestions. I am looking for nice tablet with not too high price tag. I narrowed down selection to two tablets: Tegra NOTE 7 and LG G Pad 8.3 (in conjunction with Jot PRO stylus).

Since I need tablet for school stuff my priority is note taking ability of a tablet so I would like to hear from those who already have Tegra NOTE if it is good enough to write down notes (does hand rejection also work in other apps or just in ones provided by Nvidia) or is it better to go with lg g pad and Jot stylus?

Thanks!

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Ok.... I might be doing it wrong. I haven't put much effort into playing with the settings and so forth. But I'm using the Write app that comes with it and frankly I think it's terrible. It's not even worthy of a grocery list, much less the type of note taking you'll need to do in a class.

Vibrate said:

Ok.... I might be doing it wrong. I haven't put much effort into playing with the settings and so forth. But I'm using the Write app that comes with it and frankly I think it's terrible. It's not even worthy of a grocery list, much less the type of note taking you'll need to do in a class.

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I JUST got my Tegra Note 7 today, so no idea, but I use LectureNotes for note-taking on my Samsung Note 2 and it is great.

I will let you know how I feel about the Tegra Note soon... I went with it over the Note 8 (even though I have a note 2) because it was cheaper, newer and faster. As far as I know the G Pad is not a true stylus, the Samsung Notes use a true, active (Wacom) stylus, and the Tegra Note is something in between. Not an active stylus, so no "hover" support, but otherwise it is supposed to be comparable, and even have a bit less lag.

But again, we shall see soon enough...

Okay so here's what I found with taking notes in classes with this tablet. I am an avid fan of taking notes with my tablet. I used to do it on my Galaxy tab 3 7 inch but I found that I needed drawing capabilities because I'm an engineer and drawing out the free body diagrams on the board was nigh impossible. So I bought the Tegra Note 7 for its stylus and awesome processing power. Here's what I found through taking notes on tablets (both the Galaxy Tab 3 and Tegra):

1.) It's not paper. It won't feel like paper. It won't act like paper. You can't move it around like paper. So trying to take traditional pen and paper notes on a tablet is not feasible, even on the more expensive Galaxy Note tablets. We're just not at that stage of technological development yet. That doesn't mean styluses don't have their use though.... (I'll explain later on)

2.) If you want to take notes on your tablet, invest in a good physical bluetooth keyboard. This is so much nicer than trying to type with the on screen keyboard. Heck, I've even stopped taking pen and paper notes because its so much easier, faster, and more useful to type out notes than handwriting them. I use evernote. This syncs all the notes I take to a cloud. That means I can access those notes on my computer, my tablet, AND my phone. Without having to rewrite it or downloading it manually to every device. This is so useful when you're taking a poop and you're like, oh hey I can use this time to study. Just pull out your phone and boom! all your notes right there to read during your... lets just go with leisure time. So invest in a good physical bluetooth keyboard. And not one of those crappy ones that come with the cases. I use this one: Logitech 920-003390 Tablet Keyboard for Android 3.0 Plus.

3.) So what is the stylus good for? I find that its useful for more annotating PDF files and pictures. If I have time to prepare for a class before hand, I'll go through the professor's lecture and put in a base guideline for what my notes will look like. I'll place all the images that he/she will talk about and I'll pretype out notes for what's going to be said. Then during lecture, I just make adjustments to my notes as the professor talks. When he comes to a diagram or photo, I pull out the pen, and use the annotate feature on evernote to highlight or draw on important parts of the figure. This only works with classes where the professor gives out the powerpoints before class however.

So thats how I've been taking my notes. Hope it helped you decide!

Personally I was referring to taking notes by hand - with the stylus.

Now that I've used it for a week or so, I can say that (unfortunately) the Tegra stylus is nowhere near as good for writing longhand as the Galaxy note tablet which have an active stylus. After reading a few reviews I thought it might be close, but the Galaxy is so much more precise, especially for smaller handwriting.

For the price, and the fact it is not an active stylus the Tegra Note is pretty good, but if you plan to write your notes by hand with a stylus, the Samsung devices are where it's at right now (too bad they are so expensive!).

Was worth a shot. I'm probably very much in the minority of people who prefer to write my notes though. I just remember them better that way. I still like the tablet, especially for the price, but for now I'll keep using my Note 2 phone for notes, because even with the smaller screen, it's more comfortable to write with.