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Ask HN: Do you use a tablet?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Do you use a tablet?

#61

Post by shaded2 »

Raed667 wrote: post #53
shaded2 wrote: post #50

I found that I hardly used my nexus 7 and my toddler pretty much made it his own. I use my work MacBook for everything I couldn't or did not want to do on my phone. At some i began to feel like I needed an in betweeen device and a tablet which is essentially a bigger phone was not the answer. Enter the Asus chronebook flip. Its a thin 10 inch chromebook with a touchscreen that flips all the way around and becomes a t…

I just found a nexus 7 (2013) being sold around the corner by a guy that never even opened the box for 150$. Should I pass if I'm going to use it for web + note taking ?

If you have a phone that is at least 5.5 inches l'd say pass on any 7 inch device.

Re: Ask HN: Do you use a tablet?

#62

Post by Raed667 »

gaze wrote: post #11

I have a surface pro 3 that I use exclusively for note taking. I'm a physicist and hand written notes are absolutely crucial. The fat iPad style stylii have way too thick a tip for anything useful. Surface Pros, Lenovo tablets with digitizers, and Samsung Galaxy notes are very popular among people who do calculations

The surface pro 3 is more expensive than my laptop. The price is not justifiable for a student living in a 3rd world country.

Re: Ask HN: Do you use a tablet?

#63

Post by analog31 »

Tell HN: There are probably a lot of people, myself included, for whom a keyboard is integral to our work, due to coding. If this is the main obstacle to using a tablet, maybe someone should develop an on screen keyboard with layouts that can be customized for the different languages. I'll take one with all of the vital symbols for Python on one layer.

Right now I have a tablet that can be used with or without its detachable keyboard. It was given to me, so I have nothing invested in it. Aside from the obvious uses of surfing and note taking, I've got iPython Notebook on it. That's become my primary "terminal" for most of my technical work these days, so I can't live without it.

In all due honesty, I'll have to admit that the motivation for having iPython Notebook on a tablet, is to occupy myself during meetings. I've settled on not trying to compose big codes, but use the time to learn more about Python and general programming by surfing the web for cool tutorials and interesting new packages.

A tablet seems to be pretty much the biggest thing that I'm willing to actually carry around. The keyboard has the drawback of requiring me to have a horizontal surface to put it on. My little Moleskine notebook still wins for note taking.

Re: Ask HN: Do you use a tablet?

#65

Post by SyneRyder »

ant6n wrote: post #54
SyneRyder wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's intriguing to me. I love my Galaxy Tab A 8.0 (the successor to the Note 8). S-Note has improved a lot since the Note 8 came out, you can now cut & paste and resize parts of your drawing. I think the screen is larger as well (it's now a 4:3 ratio, not the 16:10 of the Note 8). I've never tried Windows Journal though, so I'm not sure which features I'm missing out on. S-Note could definitely be improved more.

In journal drawings, are vectors: you can zoom in a lot, you can copy paste/resize them, you can erase individual strokes completely by tapping one part of them (if you set the eraser to vector). In journal you can specify your own background; I like little squares to draw and take notes rather than college-book style lines. In S-Note they pre-defined a few paper templates, and the only thing that comes close ('idea…

Sounds like the new S-Note has addressed some of your concerns. Strokes are vectors, and you can resize/ move individual strokes. You can zoom in & out of the page too.

You can change the notes background, including to backgrounds saved in your own image library. So you could create your own forms to fill in, but there's no guidance on how to design those background images. They're now a mix of Paper (background color/texture) and Pattern (eg repeating lines for writing on, or grids / dots for graph papers).

S-Note files are also in Android's file explorer, but I don't know of any program that can open them. You can export to PDF. Text searching is via Evernote, and I'm not sure its handwriting recognition is reliable with S-Note. Page management is still a pain. There's an option to convert your lasso into a square now & save it to your Scrapbook, but it isn't as easy as a crop tool.

I don't think there's a way to update S-Note, unless Samsung updates the whole tablet (ie to Android 5). Frustrating! The new S-Note would make your Note 8 much more powerful if there's a way to hack it onto there.

Re: Ask HN: Do you use a tablet?

#66

Post by kyriakos »

shaded2 wrote: post #50

I found that I hardly used my nexus 7 and my toddler pretty much made it his own. I use my work MacBook for everything I couldn't or did not want to do on my phone. At some i began to feel like I needed an in betweeen device and a tablet which is essentially a bigger phone was not the answer. Enter the Asus chronebook flip. Its a thin 10 inch chromebook with a touchscreen that flips all the way around and becomes a t…

I stopped using my nexus 7 as soon as I got a phone with a 5.2 inch screen. I think if you own a phablet it duplicates the tablet's functionality while having the benefit of being always with you.

Re: Ask HN: Do you use a tablet?

#67

Post by vram22 »

rev_bird wrote: post #58

tl;dr: I use the Galaxy Note 3 for my phone and tablet. I use it because it's got just enough real estate to check out Reddit/Twitter/websites while on the go, but I wouldn't personally recommend it for note-taking. -- I had an iPad for a few years and then sold it somewhere around 2013. I just didn't use it enough, because my laptop was so much more useful for what I was doing, which was mostly coding and writing em…

>I realized I have a Galaxy Note 3

Notice any drawbacks to it, after using it a while?

Re: Ask HN: Do you use a tablet?

#68

Post by irixusr »

SandersAK wrote: post #39

I use my iPad exclusively at home. I now never take my work laptop home and it had dramatically made my life better. iPad forces me to be much more switched off but I can still email if need be. It's honestly one of the best things for my work-life balance that's ever happened to me.

To disconnect I got a blackberry curve. Still has email and wifi feathering if I need it. Other than that it sucks and I love it.

I might replace it with a "tomorrow m5" phone; a feature phone the size of four stacked credit cards.

Re: Ask HN: Do you use a tablet?

#70

Post by dang »

oskarth wrote: post #20

Every day I see the top comment in a thread being a typical middlebrow dismissal, the type that adds nothing to the discussion. With that in mind, it's really surprising to me that this comment was downvoted. Before I upvoted it, it was grey, and after I upvoted, it was still grey. Who are these people who downvote a perfectly good comment like this? It puzzles my mind. At the time of writing this comment, at least 1…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10174991 and marked it off topic.
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