Okay, so far I've bought both uPad and NoteTakerHD. At first I bought NoteTakerHD for a while, then finally decided to buy uPad since I liked the smoothing of the handwriting.

Overall, uPad makes my handwriting look really good compared to NoteTakerHD.

A few things bother me in uPad, and hopefully they'll be fixed later on.
1) When you use the "Magnify input mode" for writing it greys out the screen; when I exit and reopen that input mode, it starts you allll the way at the top. Very annoying if you're far down the page.

2) You can't move text around like you can in Note Taker HD. So if my instructor decides to edit his/her notes, I'd have to erase or write tiny next to what I wrote. In NT HD, I can select and move my work easily.


Overall, I still like uPad more. Mainly because it's simple and your handwriting looks TONS better on uPad than any other app I've used.

Upad is by far my favorite note taker. It's fast, intuitive and has a handy palm rest. You can organize your notes in heirarchical folders. A great feature is you can save a .pdf document in upad, then mark it up, annotate, highlight, whatever you want. Then print or email the annotated document. You can even annotate photos! At work we send clients detailed instruction letters. In one particular situation we were having a difficult time getting the client to respond to all our instructions. I took the letter and circled and highlighted critical points. Then i used another color to priortize our requests. Voila! The much needed information begain to pour in. I believe it was due to the colorful display I created with Upad!

Originally Posted by AznVamp

Okay, so far I've bought both uPad and NoteTakerHD. At first I bought NoteTakerHD for a while, then finally decided to buy uPad since I liked the smoothing of the handwriting.

Overall, uPad makes my handwriting look really good compared to NoteTakerHD.

A few things bother me in uPad, and hopefully they'll be fixed later on.
1) When you use the "Magnify input mode" for writing it greys out the screen; when I exit and reopen that input mode, it starts you allll the way at the top. Very annoying if you're far down the page.

2) You can't move text around like you can in Note Taker HD. So if my instructor decides to edit his/her notes, I'd have to erase or write tiny next to what I wrote. In NT HD, I can select and move my work easily.

Overall, I still like uPad more. Mainly because it's simple and your handwriting looks TONS better on uPad than any other app I've used.

I agree, handwriting looks better on upad. Hopefully the other issues you raise will be addressed in future updates. Have you tried emailing the developers?

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For the absolute simplest with no extras it has to be Bamboo (free with a small number of notebooks).

Does nothing but handwritten notes. No shapes, no typing, nothing extra. And this only in portrait mode.

However, one huge plus, it seems to have an automatic built-in wrist-rest. Resting your wrist on the lower part of the screen usually does not register any marks.

As the free version is very usable it's worth trying it out. I did end up paying the in-app purchase of extra notebooks but shouldn't have as when I need more than Bamboo offers for free I use Upad or Note Taker.

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iJot is also worth a look. It's a funny way of writing but once you get used to it, the experience is smoother than most note taker.
The idea is that the screen scroll as you write so that the line seems infinite. It's hard to explain actually, the video and their web site describes it better.