PDA - Good for Taking Notes?

[tarheel810]

I use my PDA for note taking all the time. I have a PocketPC without a built-in keyboard. I have a thumb keyboard that I can attach for note-taking but have found a much simpler solution. I have PhatNotes and Calligrapher installed. I take notes at meetings in handwriting just like paper. When I return to the office, I can have the notes converted to text if I want to save them for future reference, or I can save them in the handwritten form if having them in text is not important.

[hth]

I carry my Palm always with me and use it for notes if there are not to much of them. In conferences I carry normally a notebook with me and decide on the fly if the notes become to much for the pda.
Naturally the necessity of drawing a diagram assists to speed up this decision.

Yours
Alexander

[Borisoff]

I use my Palm as Universal Capture Device. I collect everything in Notes section (Draw Mode). I collect voice messages while driving (Recording Mode). When Planning I prefer to use paper.

Regards,
Eugene.

[funkym]

My BlackBerry Pearl is great for taking notes. I use the internal MemoPad and it works fine. It even synchronizes my notes with my Mac

[Jay Levitt]

I've owned a PDA since the Palm 1000, and about half a dozen since then. I always have it out and ready during meetings, classes, etc.

In theory, it should be perfect for my note-taking needs. I don't draw diagrams or even arrows when I take notes; they're pure text.

But it never quite seems to suit my needs. It's just too slow. I've tried both Graffiti and Jot, as well as a "retrainable" version of Graffiti. Both too messy and slow. I've tried various alternate tap keyboards like MessagEase and Fitaly. I've tried word-completion dictionaries.

All had their advantages, but none really helped me enough to make the transition. I got pretty fast at Fitaly (they include a training tool, "Letris", that's pretty addictive), but it still takes a lot more *thinking* than handwriting, and I had trouble taking notes and listening at the same time.

None of the handwriting-recognition programs can recognize my handwriting, which isn't really their fault, because I can't recognize it either.

YMMV, especially now with thumb keyboards widely available. I haven't used one yet, but my next cell phone will be a PPC with a slide-out keyboard.

[dschaffner]

Not owning one, my question is: can one take notes easily on a PDA? Are they perhaps just doing other PDA stuff and people like me aren't the wiser?

I have a Treo 650. I will use it in real time to make a note about an upcoming meeting on my calendar, but for general short notetaking, I use a spacepen and a pocketmod.

For extensive notes I use a letter-size pad. I jot down what ever comes to mind in the meeting and process later. Sometimes this generates tasks... sometimes I just trash all of it

- Don

[carrdwight]

I have been using Digimemo notepad for over a year now. It captures my handwriting and has a pretty accurate handwriting to text conversion, which saves me time in processing my notes.

Dwight...

[Jay Levitt]

That seems like a great solution if you can carry a full-sized notepad. It does the recognition on the PC side, and a PC can (at least in theory) run *much* more powerful handwriting-recognition software than a handheld can.