Are touch screen tablet / laptop hybrids a meme...

a tablet bigger than 8 inches is a meme outside of very few niche uses so yes generally speaking bigger =/= better they're clumsy

I find that writing on paper is better for brainstroming and retention than typing.

As for writing on screen tablet I have never tried it, I'm not really sure, sounds like a good idea but nowadays all new tech products and software tend to be awkward to use.

Taking handnotes may be useful. I prefer typing them up as my hand writing is shite. Drawing is actually really good, pressure sensitive pen and all. Though if you plan on using something like PS or Illustrator, make sure you splurge for the model with 8GB of ram.

Doing maths is alright on the Pro 4, especially if you have PC access to your materials you can just copy paste sections and annotate the problems for homework sets. Though you should learn LaTeX if you plan on doing anything professional or academic.

I'd like a 2 in 1 but... they just don't come anywhere near enough the 2 (e.g laptop experience) to make them worthy.

I want to like the idea of MS Surface (currently have a surface 2) (inb4 botnet) but just not convenient enough of a form factor for mid-tier use (Excel, SQL etc).

I can't understand why the market hasn't yet been flooded by cheaper ultrabooks

Tbh not as useful as a laptop. In two years people will still use laptops, but they emphatically will NOT use the windows meme pro anything.

im using a surface 3 pro right now and its fantastic. I dont really use it in class as i prefer pencil n notebook, but everything else is great.
i do all my classwork on it and what not.

Dont know what else to say really. Would I recommend it? yes, definately.

I'm a university student, and I've had a 12.9" iPad Pro for a week or so, so I've got some things to say on this front. I can say from personal experience that I've only need a "Real Computer" for one thing since I got it: importing PDFs to my cloud storage so I can import them into Notability from there. Safari flips the fuck out and doesn't share PDFs to other apps properly. It's annoying, but not really a deal-breaker as long as you have a cheap desktop at home, and it'll probably get fixed as time goes on.

No, OP, not a meme. It's fucking fantastic to be able to handwrite instead of type when you feel like it. It's also good to never have to worry about paper: whether or not you're carrying it, whether or not you're carrying enough, where you're going to file it when you're done, whether you're carrying the kind of ruling (college rule, wide rule, graph paper) you need, etc. Colored ink is a huge bonus too. With my Apple Pencil, I carry the practical equivalent of a big box of colored pencils/pens around with me, without actually having to carry them and switch between them manually. I also don't have to worry about the state of my erasers, or about the time occupied by the physical act of erasing while the lecturer drones on. I just hit the 'Undo' button.

THIS, THIS, THIS. I'm a CS student, and doing mathematical notation on a computer keyboard makes me want to shoot myself in the head twice.

I'm sure it was, but this is 2016, and you can do better now.

What is a laptop?

Handwriting is indeed proven to be superior for retention.

The Surface is as useful as a laptop. That's not the problem with it. The problem with it is that it's so useless without a hardware keyboard that its tablet gimmick is effectively meaningless, making it a glorified laptop in practice.

I'm using my pro 3 for all notes. It's invaluable in some aspects, but OneNote is super annoying to use sometimes, and it's not really optimised for note taking.

>importing PDFs to my cloud storage so I can import them into Notability from there. Safari flips the fuck out and doesn't share PDFs to other apps properly. It's annoying, but not really a deal-breaker as long as you have a cheap desktop at home, and it'll probably get fixed as time goes on.

I'd actually like to correct this. I just figured out what I was doing wrong. The standard share sheet shares the URL of the PDF, just like it'd do to any regular web page. There's a button in the same bar as the 'Open in iBooks' button that'll share the actual PDF over to another app.

Never mind, the iPad Pro is perfect again.

>I'm sure it was, but this is 2016, and you can do better now.
It actually just died on me a few weeks ago, corrupt memory. I'm probably going to replace it with the same model because I fucking love it

Surface Pro 4 faggot here, went paperless the last two semesters, being able to write on PDFs is a game changer and infinite scaling on OneNote is amazing (don't use the one from office 2016 though).

The Surface pen is probably the selling point in my opinion, pressure sensitivity and whatnot, you can turn that fucker around like you would with a pencil and erase shit, either by stroke or regular, the AAAA battery it came with (after a year) is at 21% power left. And you can change the tip to whatever you feel like it.

The second selling point is that it can function on small desks, the kickstand makes it so it doesn't take up a whole screen size of space on the desk like a laptop would, and that you can switch to it laying flat on the desk like a tablet would.

the m3 model is really fucking cheap, especially with student discounts from the microsoft store and if you're not trying to do some stupid shit other than super light gaming, you should be fine.

Thanks, this is really encouraging!

If you're actually going to spend the money to get a surface then yeah they're great for portability, and you can take pretty good notes with the pen and notes app. Honestly ask yourself if you'll use the touch screen, cause there fuckers are pricey.

>I'd like a 2 in 1 but... they just don't come anywhere near enough the 2 (e.g laptop experience) to make them worthy.

What? There's plenty of 2 in 1's out there that are just laptops with a screen that can be folded 360 degrees.

2 in 1 laptops are still kind of a meme, until they get lighter when you're using it as a tablet, but it's not like there's any drawbacks in having more options on how you can use it.

I'm glad more companies are starting to do this kind of form factor, I recently replaced my first gen iPad mini with a cheapo Chinese Android tablet but I realize I barely use my tablet at this point. The small screen just blows dick for any kind of productivity more advanced than typing stuff with an external keyboard or reading documents.

...

If it's a detachable tablet with a STYLUS like the note series it's not a meme. But if it's just a tablet touchscreen it can fuck off .

Fuck I meant the SURFACE BOOK series.

What the heck is that? It looks pretty nice.

it's the new lenovo 2 in 1 that instead of writing on the screen itself, and having a proper keyboard, has a touchsrenn keyboard that doubles up as digitizer table

I take very scarce notes and find pen and paper the best. I have an iPad pro and I can draw on it nicely but the feel of pen and paper is so much better.

The only classes where taking notes actually mattered were maybe ones where the professor would test you on something that wasn't in the textbook, and that was so rare it didn't matter. Pay attention to lecture rather than take useless notes.

Hey, I'm the iPad-Pro-fag from up above. How do you like yours, in general? I'm curious, because very few people have an informed opinion on it that comes from actually using one.

my professor had a Surface and it lags like a motherfucker

Yes and yes.

t. person who went from writing everything out on paper to not even bringing a notebook to class anymore because there is zero reason to.