Looking for a tab for notes

[radmanhs]

Since I'm a techy, I though I might as well try introducing tech into my student life.  I've been using paper and pencil forever, but I want to try digitizing my notes.  I'm a lefty, which makes it hard to use some products, such as the Rocketbook Everlast, since my hand smudges the ink.  I thought a tab and stylus might be a cool thing to use.

 

What would your recommendations be?  Don't take price too much into consideration, but I'm not feeling spending 2G's on the top of the line surface pro just for notes.

[Daniel Z.]

iPad mini or some Samsung tablet is what I would get. There aren't really any other options under a rack

[Nena Trinity]

14 hours ago, Daniel Z. said:

iPad mini or some Samsung tablet is what I would get. There aren't really any other options under a rack

Acer, ASUS or maybe the Amazon ones? Not sure if Amazon tabs can be used with notes tough...

[kennethnakasone]

I'm in a similar situation as you, and was able to try out the iPad Pro (Gen 2) and Surface Pro 4 yesterday (I also wanted to try a Samsung Tab Pro S3, but I couldn't find a store with a demo).

 

I'm sure you're familiar with how the cursor can "lag" behind the stylus of devices during fast and long strokes, but this was almost not noticeable on the iPad Pro (at most, it would lag less than half a centimeter behind the Pencil when swinging my hand around wildly). In contrast, the lag on the Surface Pro was more apparent (perhaps 2 centimeters of delay at most under similar usage), but both were very accurate. I tried transferring some of my o-chem notes to each tablet, and in both cases, I didn't have trouble drawing things like benzene rings, carbonyls, chair-conformations, et cetera.

 

Palm rejection on both were very good. There might be a difference, but neither caused me issues during my time with them. 

 

Using the stylus on the Surface Pro initially felt more natural to me, and the sharper tip (compared to the Apple Pencil) made it easier to see what I was writing (although this benefit would sometimes be negated by the aforementioned lag). It wasn't that hard to get used to the Apple Pencil though. One thing I will note is that sometimes the iPad Pro would not react when tapping a menu item with the Apple Pencil. It's probably a combination of tapping too lightly and too quickly, but in any case, it occurred more with the iPad Pro than the Surface Pro when I tried them out.

 

At the moment, I'm leaning towards a refurb iPad Pro w/ the works, but I need to spend some time with the Tab Pro S3 first.

 

I'd suggest taking some of your existing notes and transferring them onto the demo devices to see how they feel. Watching Youtube videos made the Surface Pro seem too slow to be practical for real-time note-taking, but I was pleasantly surprised.

[Pachuca]

I'm late to the party, but I was reading this thread because I'm also looking for something to replace all my notebooks and help organize me better. I settled on this Lenovo yoga book @$329 usd with windows 10. The android option would probably function better,  but I would rather share stuff between my other computers and this tablet. It has a lot of good reviews and I really just need a note taking machine for simple stuff like math notes, no fancy graphics required. Anyway, hope this helps.