Tablet for engineering

[juggalomike]

I am headed off to uni as an engineering student and wondering if a tablet is a good choice for me? I was originally planning on getting a laptop to game with and use for notes in a few classes(not many since mathematics notes are easier written). I am now considering getting a tablet as well as a desktop(the tablet would be for notes and the desktop for gaming) After looking around at tablets they seem interesting, however i have a few concerns. My primary concern would be the tablet crashing and my notes getting erased, so my question in regards to that is how stable are they? I have not seen a lot of input on this site about them directly, other then a few posts by various people supporting or bashing them. Is a tablet useful for taking notes as an engineering student or would i be better off sticking to pencil and paper?

 

[Emulex]

2730p is a nice unit. no graphics card to fry. mil-spec. intel ssd. no moving parts. battery dock(thin) for 10hr runtime; conventional dock for extra ports/dvd.

very solid unit those elitebooks. an engineer would notice the factors that went into the build quality over say a x200t lenovo.

 

[Knavish]

I've been out of (grad) school for a couple years now, but I've never seen anyone taking notes on a tablet in an engineering class. I haven't used them too much, but I think it would be like taking notes with a sharpie marker. (You get a relatively fat line on a relatively low res screen.) I think pencil and paper would be easier. If you want to digitize your notes (which would be a cool and somewhat useful idea), you could either get a flatbed scanner or you could get one of those digital pens (they require special paper / I've never used one of these either): Random Digital Pen at Amazon

 

[mpilchfamily]

DEL

 

[Athena]

I think you need to find someone who has been using a table for a while. Most of the people I know who use them regularly wouldn't go back to a standard laptop.

Tablets are in their second and third generations now. If I had a college aid relative, i would wholeheartedly encourage him to get one -- from a manufacturer's Outlet at discount.

 

[Athena]

Originally posted by: Knavish
I haven't used them too much, but I think it would be like taking notes with a sharpie marker. (You get a relatively fat line on a relatively low res screen.) I think pencil and paper would be easier. If you want to digitize your notes (which would be a cool and somewhat useful idea

Everyone I know who uses a tablet uses handwriting recognition to digitize their notes immediately; no one saves handwriting.

 

[Aarondeep]

I save plenty of my handwriting, ive been using my tablet for 2 years in grad school. Everyone in my class of 220 students has a tablet PC provided by the school.
This thing has been very handy, i dont bother digitizing some random notes i write on top of slides. I still type alot but having a pen for quick notes and diagrams is awesome.

I initially started with a gateway tablet (i sold that piece of trash and got my own) and now i'm using an Lenovo X61T.
The new incoming class is going to get X200T 's and I think they great PCs and the build quality is what you would expect from IBMs old thinkpad line.

 

[fatpat268]

Originally posted by: Athena

Originally posted by: Knavish
I haven't used them too much, but I think it would be like taking notes with a sharpie marker. (You get a relatively fat line on a relatively low res screen.) I think pencil and paper would be easier. If you want to digitize your notes (which would be a cool and somewhat useful idea

Everyone I know who uses a tablet uses handwriting recognition to digitize their notes immediately; no one saves handwriting.

I rarely ever digitized my notes... when I did I usually had to correct a bunch errors in recognition that the software made. My handwriting isn't unusually messy, but it never recognized it that well. But this was 2 years ago, who knows if they made improvements in OneNote.

I went tablet pc, and I went back to a regular laptop. A tablet is convenient, but to me it was more hassle than it was worth. I used a tablet for my first two years in college. The first year I was pretty enthusiastic, bringing it to every class taking notes on it. By the time the second year rolled around, I had to get it fixed (motherboard problem, but toshiba fixed it in less than 2 weeks), and I ultimately reinstalled windows at point or another. My point is, it's a computer, and it's subject to problems. If you really want to use it as your primary note taking device, I recommend printing your notes out regularly and stashing them away, just in case.

By the third year, I bought a regular laptop and just brought a spiral notebook with me instead.

 

[Fox5]

I was an engineering student with a tablet and a desktop.

The tablet was useful for taking notes, but not with Windows on it. Granted, this was back on a 4200RPM hard drive single core Pentium M tablet, so current ones are faster (then again, vista is more bloated), but performance made it completely unusable with Windows XP Tablet Edition. It got token use my freshman year.

My senior year, I finally dug it out again and got Ubuntu set up and configured fully on it, and then I took quite a bit of notes. Xournal is a nifty bit of free software, and performance was way better. Plus, it had the ability to output straight to PDF, as well as to write on pdfs.

Still, tablets aren't much more expensive than normal laptops, so why not go for it? It's a real time saver for drawing diagrams that have to go into reports (though you'll probably mostly use real CAD tools for that later).

Oh, and you could always back up your notes to a desktop periodically. That's what I did. If you go the linux root, you can even save them on a separate partition.

 

[Athena]

Originally posted by: Fox5
The tablet was useful for taking notes, but not with Windows on it. Granted, this was back on a 4200RPM hard drive single core Pentium M tablet, so current ones are faster (then again, vista is more bloated), but performance made it completely unusable with Windows XP Tablet Edition.

As you might expect, current generation tablets are lighter and faster. And Vista (with adequate memory) is much better in this situation than Windows XP tablet.