Tong Family

Well, I’ve been trying different ways to take notes for a while. The traditional way is really disruptive, typing into your laptop is really hard to hide and not notice. A traditional pad and paper can work if you use a cool fountain pen, then you can take photos of it, but it is hard to keep, you can use RocketBook with an erasable pen.

But, the best is to just go completely digital, so I looked at a bunch of readers and ended up getting two of them (and rejected some like the Onyx):

1. iPad Pro with Screen Protector and Nebo. The original iPad test I did didn’t work too well, the screen is too slick and the handwriting to text conversion didn’t work well. But the good news is that with a few changes, an iPad Pro is my best choice for taking notes. The 12.9″ iPad is a great form factor for this and if you take it out of the the keyboard case. The latest version of Nebo works really well. You can convert the text when you want and it shows you what works and you can correct it. You just scribble out to erase and you can correct old text.
2. Kindle Scribe. This is much cheaper at $250 when you get it on Prime Days. It has a nice feel even without the special screen protector. And of course the battery lasts for days and days. The main issues are that the Kindle pencil sometimes doesn’t register correctly, but the feel is really nice. The second issue is that text conversion is pretty weird, you can’t see what the conversion is or correct it, it only happens if you swipe down and then it does a conversion and sends it via email or whatever. Net, net, I’d say if you really want to take notes, bet on the iPad Pro with the fixings. But if you want to read papers and things, the scribe is much bigger than the Kindle Paperwhite, so while more expensive, its worth it for deep technical documents.

As an aside, I’m using the old iPad Pro (2018) and it is nice to have the 12.9″ form factor, but it is expensive, a reasonable tradeoff is the iPad Air (2023) which supports the Apple Pencil and is a more reasonable $500 on sale.

I haven’t tried the Remarkable yet, but lots of people seem to like that.