Notes Improved
As an avid notetaker I'm always on the lookout for a better way to take notes. I've often tried using various digital tools to take typed notes. I've gone between Evernote, Onenote, among others, to my current digital notebook, Obsidian. And while Obsidian does fine for me, I prefer to use it to organize and catalog finished notes and collections. I have never found a more natural way of taking on the fly notes than plane old pen and paper.
The drawback with pen and paper is simple, organization. I find myself with notebooks full of unorganized notes and no great way to index them. As I'm sure many others do, I often find myself searching through page after page looking to refer back to a note I wrote previously on a topic.
The Solution
So, what's the solution? A digital notepad of course! I've long wanted a digital notepad since I saw the Remarkable tablet back in 2016 or so. Since then the Remarkable 2 tablet and other competitors have been released. After many years of debate, I found myself finally ready to pull the trigger.
I spent plenty of time researching diferent tablets and the decision came down to the Remarkable 2 and the Kindle Scribe. Ultimately, I ended up with the Kindle Scribe for a number of reasons. This post isn't meant to recommend one platform over the other, as I don't have enough experience with any to advise. Do your own research and pick the tablet that has the feature set you are looking for.
After owning the Scribe now for a few weeks and taking quite a few notes on it, I can say it is a great experience. And it is experience that very closely replicates the feel of taking a note with traditional pen and paper. The Scribe allows you to organize your notes into simple folders. Notes can be exported and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) can produce searchable PDFs or convert your handwriting to plain text.
The Downside
Exporting notes is a manual process. This means that every note you want to export from the Scribe must be done indivually by finding the note and going through the share process. The note is then sent to your email. I truley wish Amazon would either build some sort of online portal to sync your notes to or integrated with Dropbox, OneDrive, etc... An automated solution to bring my notes onto my computer for cataloging would be exteremely powerful/useful.
Summary
The Scribe (and digital notepads) in general are to the point that they really do mimick the feel of traditional paper and pen. It is an experience that is good enough to make this avid paper and pen user appreciate it. The current system of syncing notes with the Scribe leaves a bit to be desired, but its not a dealbreaker for me at this point. If you are looking for a better way to take written notes, I would seriously recommend giving it a try.