The 5 Best Smart Notebooks That Are Both Cool and Convenient

If you're in the market for a smart reusable notebook, you can't go wrong with the Rocketbook. It allows you to upload your notes to the cloud and erase them with ease. The Core kit includes a Pilot FriXion pen that offers a smooth writing experience, the material of the pen and the notebook feels premium and best of all the notebooks come in multiple sizes and colors to suit your preferences.

“The Rocketbook smart system has allowed me to keep my notes in order, and my carbon footprint at a minimum,” said senior commerce editor Cat Bowen. “For someone who takes a lot of notes on a daily basis, this is huge. I love how all the products work together in the same system, making notes, dates, and even drawings and doodles completely searchable. I don’t always love waiting for the ink to dry, but that’s a small price to pay for the overall convenience of the product.”

For those who are willing to spend a little extra, consider the Rocketbook Fusion kit, which offers multiple page styles including a task list page, two weekly planner pages, a monthly calendar page, Objectives and Key Results page, and an ideas page along with 18 dot grid pages and 18 lined pages.

Rather than having multiple pages, the Boogie Board Blackboard has a letter-sized semi-transparent writing surface a bit like a touchscreen that allows you to write with a stylus. Blackboard calls the tech “liquid crystal paper” and it allows you to write electronically without ink or paper.

The Boogie Board lets you erase just a portion of your work, similar to erasing with a pencil or you can push a button, and it’ll wipe the entire page. The Blackboard has a number of downloadable templates to keep your thoughts and work organized ranging from lined “paper” to dots, a planner, graph paper, and more.

Coaches will love the convenience of the Boogie Board Blackboard for drawing up plays and strategies during games using templates that resemble fields.

It’s worth mentioning that in order to save your work you have to take a picture of the screen with your smartphone using a free app. Boogie Board makes a “smart pen” that automatically saves everything you write, for those looking to automate the process.

The Kindle Scribe marks Amazon’s first e-reader that is specifically designed for note-taking and drawing. With its 10.2-inch screen, this e-reader is likely bigger than the Kindle you’re used to, which will give you plenty of room to jot down notes, illustrations, and ideas.

Weighing 0.95 pounds and measuring in at just 0.22 inches thick, it’s lighter than the iPad Air and is one of the slimmest e-readers you can buy. During my tests with the Scribe, I appreciated its thick bezel on its long side, which made it easy to grip one-handed without any accidental button presses. I’m left-handed, so it was really cool that I could interact with it in either orientation.

I was blown away by how the Kindle replicated the experience of writing on a page. I could even flip its stylus around to erase mistakes without dealing with annoying eraser dust. The display was responsive with no latency and I rarely experienced accidental page turns from my palm being on the screen.

Compared to the competing Kobo Elipsa 2e eReader, the Scribe feels a lot less sluggish. It rendered PDFs faster and has a much sharper display that comes in handy when reading comics or manga. The text in speech bubbles looked a lot cleaner and less pixelated.

The Kindle app came in handy for syncing all of my notes and drawings that I created on the Scribe to my smartphone and tablet. However, I could only view them. The Scribe essentially sends image files to the cloud, but for now, there’s no way to scribble in changes to your notes on other devices other than on the Scribe itself.

Overall, the Scribe is a great tool for people who prefer the feel of pen and paper but want the convenience of digital storage and the ability to annotate books and jot down notes.

Whether you want to use it for note-taking, free writing, drawing, or marking up PDFs, the ReMarkable 2 is an outstanding tool that’s polished and will give you that pen-on-paper experience you crave. The device is incredibly thin and lightweight (just .18 inches thick and 14 ounces), and it features a lovely paper-like 10.3-inch e-ink display.

We love its minimal home screen and how intuitive and easy to use the smart notebook is. You can choose between multiple notebooks, use tags to sort your notes (a feature the Kindle Scribe lacks), and convert your handwritten notes to text, which you can search and reference on your other devices later.

The ReMarkable 2 supports reading and annotating PDFs or ebooks plus the device has more than 50 different templates you can select from including lined pages, blank music sheets, storyboards, and graph paper.

Without a doubt, the ReMarkable 2 is the most sophisticated and versatile smart notebook you can buy. It’s the only option we’ve come across that has a removable keyboard (sold separately) for those who want an all-in-one device that lets you type out notes and reports, too without being distracted by a colorful display or dozens of apps like you’d find on a tablet or laptop.

If you’ve ever used an Apple Pencil you already know that writing on glass isn’t a tactile experience due to a lack of friction between the tip of the Pencil and the iPad’s glass screen. The Paperlike screen protector offers users a subtle texture enhancement to make writing and drawing on an iPad feel much more natural.

“Paperlike gives your screen a little bit of tooth, similar to a sheet of paper,” said Amber Neely a contributor at Apple Insider. “That extra friction means you won't hold your Apple Pencil in a death grip. No death grip means you're less likely to get hand cramps.”

The Paperlike comes in a pack of two, it’s easy to install and will immediately improve your writing experience on an iPad so it feels more controlled and easier to do.