There seem to be more and more devices with styluses entering the market, and I was wondering where members of this community stand in this regard.

We have already had some discussion about it before, but I thought it would deserve its own thread.

To kick it off, here is a review comparing the latest entrants into this space:

"2018 iPad vs. Acer Chromebook Tab 10: education showdown"

https://www.slashgear.com/2018-ipad-vs-acer-chromebook-tab-10-education-showdown-03525812/

Personally I'm only using Boogie Board Sync for handwritten notes, but it's very likely that my next Chromebook will come with a stylus (or I might even get one of these new Chrome tablets), if this turns out to work properly (no lag, quick access).

Have we passed the gimmicky stage and arrived at usable handwritten notetaking and stylus use that can be used as the primary way of interacting with a device in real-life situations?

I used Canson Papershow briefly, but the company soon discontinued it with no software upgrades. It requires a special paper with a grid that the pen could follow. When Canson dropped it, the paper was no longer available. I have kept an eye on more recent devices (they have to work on Mac for me). The reputable ones seem to cost upwards of $600. Too rich for my blood.

Jeffery Smith wrote:

I used Canson Papershow briefly,
It requires a special paper with a grid that
the pen could follow.

Oh, yeah, the ones using actual paper is another sub-category of this space.

I've just read about the Rocketbook Everlast with the Pilot FriXion Erasable Gel Ink Pen. But using a wet cloth to wipe the ink would be a bit too messy for me:

"Expand Your Writing Potential with a Smart Notebook and Pen"

https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/expand-writing-smart-notebook-pen/65300

yeah the rocketbook is a bit messy.

It does work, but it may just miss a target. the only digitising action is to park the image into a storage. any storage. but honestly who uses 6 cloud storage services on a workable basis? not many I hope.
writing on paper is a backup! it's the data we want to use, so ultimately the rocketbook archives images of what could just stay as a written page in any book!
It'd be nice if they appended scanned pages to a web-document as one of their scanning options. and auto date-stamped them.

If there was a way to forward to an OCR/ICR service, then the output of rocketbook might just be fantastic!
Same with the 3m Post-it plus. its still an island until the scanned post-its are text that we can manipulate. I'm waiting for that day!

nebonotes is the most intuitive stylus based note writing app I've yet used. just wish that the promise of digital notes had it on an unlimited page/canvas size. the tech is great, but augmenting the linear process of taking physical notes has never really been addressed well.
well, In my very humble opinions...

I worked with the LiveScribe+ pen and paper. It didn't work for me.
I went back to my trusty Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 and the Samsung Notes app.

GeorgeB wrote:

I went back to my trusty Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 and the Samsung Notes app.

The S3 is a great device indeed. A bit expensive though. I have a Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet which does the job (but will less style, I admit)

Regarding the built-in Notes app, did you try StylusLabs Write ?
http://www.styluslabs.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWyxTKa2tZ0

Pierre

No, but I'll give it try. Thank you,

I suspect that there are a number of pieces of hardware and quite a few pieces of software that will support the use of handwriting. Personally, for hardware I like the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. But my experience of other devices has been limited (the most notable being those produced years ago under the Palm brand).

On the iPad there are of course quite a few applications that will faithfully record and save handwritten notes as graphical images of handwritten notes. Generally, the differences between these applications seem to me to be marginal.

But the real challenge, it appears to me, is to create software that will reliably and accurately convert that handwriting to text. That still seems more difficult to accomplish than to convert voice to text. Actually, Palm used to achieve both speed and accuracy with its own special form of shorthand (which I think was called Graffiti). But learning Graffiti was a potential barrier for users.

Today, the developer MyScript has been in existence a relatively long time and seems to lead the field, with its technology used by other brands even when this is not evident. I think I first bought a MyScript app close to the turn of the millennium. But even MyScript apps do not, it seems to me, match the accuracy of, say, Nuance voice-to-text software (although that itself is not perfect).

In other words, when working on a medium-form or long-form project, if you want to convert handwriting to text, you can get a better result (i.e. a more efficient combination of accuracy and speed) if you write the text out by hand and then use voice-to-text software to convert it to hardcopy, than if you rely on handwriting-to-text. Such is the state of handwriting-to-text technology currently.

Of course, I am certain that the technology will improve. But in my view it is not "ready for primetime" yet.

GeorgeB wrote:

I worked with the LiveScribe+ pen and paper. It didn't work for me.
I went back to my trusty Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 and the Samsung Notes
app.

I too had a "Livescribe phase". The process seemed cumbersome. But a bigger problem for me was that to accommodate the electronics and a battery, the pen was just too fat for comfort in the hand.

Hugh wrote:

I suspect that there are a number of pieces of hardware and quite a few
pieces of software that will support the use of handwriting.

Yeah, but it's one thing to "support handwriting" and another for it to **actually** work on a daily basis for real-life use in a satisfactory way, so one would prefer it over other input methods.

Even the very first iPad supported handwriting, but the latency and the size of the resulting writing made it unusable for taking notes at a meeting for instance.

Actually, Palm used to achieve both speed and accuracy with its own
special form of shorthand (which I think was called Graffiti). But
learning Graffiti was a potential barrier for users.

Graffiti did actually work for me. It was let down by the hardware in the end.

Hugh wrote:

But the real challenge, it appears to me, is to create software that
will reliably and accurately convert that handwriting to text. That
still seems more difficult to accomplish than to convert voice to text.
Actually, Palm used to achieve both speed and accuracy with its own
special form of shorthand (which I think was called Graffiti). But
learning Graffiti was a potential barrier for users.

I found Graffiti easy to learn. And writing on the Palm worked better for me than typing on my Psion 3 and 5, which I had used the years before.
For me, the idea behind Graffiti was great: Let the user do the learning because he is better at it than a machine with limited computing power.
Today, with way more powerful CPUs and machine-learning, things ought to be different - but obviously aren't.

It's been 25 years (1/4 century!) since "egg freckles" and we don't seem much closer.

http://doonesbury.slate.com/strip/set/24

I used LiveScribe for a while then stopped because I wasn't actually making much use of digital notebooks, they were only searchable within their app, the supplies were expensive, pens broke, and the software stopped working. It probably would have been a good technology for it's originally-advertised purpose of note taking in lectures, with the ability to record audio and sync it with the notes. I never used it for that purpose, though.

Technology always ages out so I don't see myself returning again to a proprietary device.

For document markup, the iPad Pro + Pencil is great.

For extensive note taking, nothing beats a good notebook and a nice pen. If I really need a digital copy, I snap the notebook pages with Scanbot and save the PDF.

My new Wacom Folio is actually rather good; the capture is remarkably precise (considering you're writing with what feels like a standard biro on standard A4 paper), and the transfer to iPad has been seamless. The "Live" mode is also entertaining, in that you can watch what you're writing/drawing on screen, while you're doing it.

I've not had much luck pairing the device with my MacBooks, however, although I confess I haven't tried very hard. Wacom's Inkspace app is much better than reviews suggested, but I'll admit I haven't tried the handwriting recognition yet, either.

After using the Folio for a while, I'd say it's probably better for taking notes than for drawing (the pen's not bad, but not particularly fine or precise), and would probably suit somebody who was into bullet journals very, very well. Not least because you can use any paper you like with the system, meaning you can replace the Rocketbook-like pad from Wacom with bullet-journal templates or any other kind of template if you wish.

An interesting experiment. I shall keep experimenting and report on further results.

Franz Grieser wrote:

Hugh wrote:
>But the real challenge, it appears to me, is to create software that
>will reliably and accurately convert that handwriting to text. That
>still seems more difficult to accomplish than to convert voice to text.
>Actually, Palm used to achieve both speed and accuracy with its own
>special form of shorthand (which I think was called Graffiti). But
>learning Graffiti was a potential barrier for users.

I found Graffiti easy to learn. And writing on the Palm worked better
for me than typing on my Psion 3 and 5, which I had used the years
before.
For me, the idea behind Graffiti was great: Let the user do the learning
because he is better at it than a machine with limited computing power.
Today, with way more powerful CPUs and machine-learning, things ought to
be different - but obviously aren't.

I should have written "...learning Graffiti was a potential barrier for some users."!

Dr Andus wrote:

Hugh wrote:
I suspect that there are a number of pieces of hardware and quite a few
>pieces of software that will support the use of handwriting.

Yeah, but it's one thing to "support handwriting" and another for it to
**actually** work on a daily basis for real-life use in a satisfactory
way, so one would prefer it over other input methods.

Even the very first iPad supported handwriting, but the latency and the
size of the resulting writing made it unusable for taking notes at a
meeting for instance.

Agreed that latency and imprecision make use of a digital device for handwritten note-taking pretty much impossible. On the iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil, there is little or no latency and much-improved precision (for a price, of course).

It will be interesting to see whether that is true of the just-announced, less expensive iPad too. The specifications of the chip that it uses suggest that it may be.

Hugh wrote:

Agreed that latency and imprecision make use of a digital device for handwritten note-taking pretty much impossible.
On the iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil, there is little or no latency and much-improved precision(for a price, of course).

Pen-enabled Samsung phone and tablets do not suffer from any latency. Neither do all Windows tablets I've tried (MS Surface Pro, Lenovo Miix 700, Acer R7, Asus T300CHI).
All great writing experience.

Pierre

Hugh wrote:

But the real challenge, it appears to me, is to create software that will reliably and accurately convert that handwriting to text.

Not all handwriting need to be converted to text. A handwriting word processor is all about writing by hand and being able to do edits (insert / move text, reflow around page, images and columns, etc)

Today, the developer MyScript has been in existence a relatively long time and seems to lead the field

I've used MyScript before, namely its Nebo app. It has the best handwriting to text conversion I've seen. But... as a handwriting word processor, it is quite poor, StylusLabs Write is much better.

But even MyScript apps do not, it seems to me, match the accuracy of, say, Nuance voice-to-text
In other words, when working on a medium-form or long-form project, if you want to convert handwriting to text, you can get a better result (i.e. a more efficient combination of accuracy and speed) if you write the text out by hand and then use voice-to-text software to convert it to hardcopy, than if you rely on handwriting-to-text.

Agreed 100% !

Pierre

At least recently, I haven't used any Windows tablets, but otherwise I think I agree with all you've written above, Pierre.

I wonder why we have taken this long to finally get out of a caveman or kindergarten paint by hand on the wall mode. I have to think that Steve Jobs was too much of a perfectionist. The reason the iPads (and iPhones) never had a stylus was because the technologies to translate the precision and accuracy of a touch-screen such as the Palm to a capacitance screen such as the iPad were non-existent at that time. To heck that he said, no one needs a stylus. What he really meant was "We cannot make the iPad devices good enough for both a finger and a stylus, so we just won't make them with a stylus (because no one _needs_ a stylus)".

I would have killed for an iPad that recognized Graffiti input as per the Palm. This to me was the real market pull waiting to be recognized.

I use an iPad to mirror in an infinite whiteboard mode during my classroom lectures. It works well enough. I have gone through my share of different stylus inputs (rubber, mesh, and disc ... though not yet any of the "active" types). I tried the iPad Pro + Apple Pencil a few weeks ago. What an order of magnitude difference. I can see myself divorcing myself fairly soon entirely from pen + paper (and now not bothering with the "active" stylus devices for my current iPad).

The allure of the other OS tablets is not high for me. Good or bad, I am wedded to the Apple ecosystem and prefer it for other reasons, some subjective and some professional (due to the other types of apps that I use). That is not to say that I do not see and appreciate the advantages and oft better approaches of the other systems.

So, in answer to the opening question ... Have we passed the gimmicky stage and arrived at a usable [system] ... I would say ... Hell yes, and it is about time that we have!

--
JJW

In Android world I've been using Handrite Pro for several years and it works well for me.

There are no reviews yet, but HP has just announced the world's first detachable Chromebook that also comes with a stylus, so it looks like Chrome OS (in combination with Android, as most of the dedicated handwritten notetaking apps are Android apps) is jumping on the handwriting bandwagon:

"HP goes up against the iPad Pro with its $599 Chromebook x2"

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/4/9/17208064/hp-chromebook-x2-chrome-os-tablet-detachable-keyboard-stylus

I have a reMarkable tablet, https://remarkable.com/ I think its great but very overpriced. Fortunately I paid for mine during the kickstarter so I got it cheap.

It does have the friction of writing on paper. The sleve they sell it with isn't very good and the pen feels a bit cheap but the device itself is great. I used to carry a plastic bag in my backpack containing lots of bits of paper I had written things on which I wanted to keep. The plastic bag went to work with me and back home again. It has now gone and the contents of the bits of paper are now in the tablet.

So all my handwritten notes are now on my laptop, desktop and on my phone as well. Many of them have been copied and pasted into ConnectedText pages.

It doesn't do anything to improve your handwriting though :(

OR you could just give up on crippled technology and go with Windows 10 on an ink-suitable PC.

Sometimes, there's a reason that a product has an 85% market share. One Note will easily do what you want.

Listerene wrote:

OR you could just give up on crippled technology and go with Windows 10
on an ink-suitable PC.

What "crippled" means is kind of subjective. There are trade-offs with each existing solution, so it depends on which trade-off you find acceptable.