Quite some years ago, while I was writing my PhD-thesis I bought my first tablet. Not an expensive, but it was decent at the time. My plan was to use it for proof-reading my thesis on. Reading on a computer screen never really worked for me, so I always ended up printing material when proof reading. One could imagine how much paper I would end up using when proof-reading a thesis, so the tablet seemed like a good investment. Unfortunately, it never really panned out as a success because the flow of annotating the thesis with corrections on the tablet simply did not match the flow I had when reading with a paper and pen. I naturally kept my tablet and used it for other purposes and my paper usage continued. Until recently.

A New Attempt

As I had to proof-read an internal report for a project, and read bachelor students thesis several times, I once again realised how much paper I used. I again turned to my trusty tablet and tried replacing pen and paper with it. It did not work, but this time I refused to fail and decided that my tablet needed replacement – after all 5 years had passed and some progress must have been made on the tablet. To my horror the apparent best tablet – for my usage – is an ipad (yikes). Luckily, Samsung has an alternative – Samsung Galaxy TAB S4 – which I bought.

I have now had this tablet for approximately a month and quite happy with it. The big difference for me is, that it has a proper stylus making it possible to write notes by handwriting. That brings me much closer to a pen and paper workflow. I have one small annoyance with the tablet: it came with a styules, but the tablet itself has no holder for the stylus, so I had to buy an expensive cover for it from Samsung (which has the stylus holder).