Now that Supernote is transitioning to their
X2 series of tablets I wanted to talk about new features and changes, and update my thoughts
about the Supernote platform now that I've been a user for about 3 years. If you want to skip to
the discussion of the current software and user experience you can scrub to this timestamp.
Otherwise, let's take a closer look at the Supernote A6X2. Side by side with the A6X it
initially doesn't look like there's much of a difference, but they did make some pretty
significant changes. First of all all the writing experience with a new FeelWrite2 film
which has a bit more texture than the older smoother film. Now before anything else I want to
say that if you're a new [A6X2] owner I and a few other people on the subreddit have noticed that
the film breaks in after a few days of use and feels less toothy or rough then right out of
the box. This broken-in film is more textured than the old one but still not a pencil on paper
rough, which I really like. It feels more like a very smooth or wet gel pen than a pencil and it
has a little less slip than the old film since it has that bit of added texture. The other major
change I appreciate is more hidden. It's that you can remove the back cover and change the battery
or expand the [storage] with an SD card. If you're anything like me and will use your gadgets for
years as long as they work, and remember the days of indestructible mobile phones with replaceable
batteries, this is a gamechanger because replacing a rundown battery or giving yourself more [storage]
often gets you a few more years out of an old device. In fact not being able to easily replace
the battery is literally on the wiki entry for planned obsolescence because it limits the usable
life of the device to the life of the battery. So it really feels like this is a company that wants
you to have their product and use it for years rather than pressure you into upgrading to the
newest shiny unit. On the [Supernote] subreddit people from Ratta have also commented that they'll
make specs of the back cover available so you can 3D print your own and even make magnets attached
to the folio available so people can customize their own covers. Just reenforcing that sense
of sustainability and support for a healthy DIY community. Of course, there are also some
processing improvements. This has double the RAM [compared to the X-series] which does
make some operations snappier than the previous generation, particularly resource intensive
ones like converting handwriting to text. So it's a nice improvement for users who use those
features heavily. There are also now two slide bars on the device on the right and the left, this
is really useful in combination with the new auto rotate feature and landscape mode, and especially
helpful for this size of device since it lets you very easily view PDFs at basically the same size
as on a larger screen just half a page at a time. This leads to one thing I've noticed about the
Supernote user experience and it's that Ratta has come through on announced or planned features and
rolled these out as software updates to existing users and plan to continue this approach with the
same firmware on the X2 devices and the previous X tablets for as long as they can. In my previous
video I mentioned some features I thought were lacking, and in the time between that one and this
one the company has come through on those features and more. One of the most significant new features
they've added is being able to link in notes so you can actually link your notes to each other to
other documents you're keeping on the device or to web pages. You can also now use PDFs as templates
while keeping links intact. This lets you use all the Supernote notebook features on your PDFs and
lets you insert pages into a PDF, not just blank pages but whatever template you want, so you can
actually manipulate PDFs right on the device. They have added handwriting recognition and search
which I know a lot of people are waiting for. I really appreciate how they implemented it in
a way that also works out for people like me who don't use it much, more on that later. Another
interesting thing they've added is screen share which makes it a great tool for collaborating
with others. There's also now a specialized app for sketching and drawing that they're working
on improving even further. But what's more interesting to me is they didn't just add new
features but have done a really commendable job of refining existing ones, for instance: adding
new gestures to make navigation and note taking even easier; more convenient management of tags or
keywords; making the global search function easier to use; allowing you to navigate the favorite
folders in the sidebar not just individual files; [and] even giving you different choices of colors
for your headings. These are all things that I really appreciate. To me this shows a quality
I think is vastly underrated when it comes to talking about these tablets: it feels like Ratta
adds new features and improves their firmware very deliberately, like you're getting a device
that is improving in a focused way that is geared toward improving your note-taking and productivity
experience. Now focus and cohesiveness are kind of abstract so let me try to give some concrete
examples of changes and other tablets that are less so. When the Kindle Scribe came out one of
the major criticisms for using it as a note-taker was a lack of organization. So Amazon did add the
ability to put in subfolders. But they stuck to just adding that feature in without thinking, hey,
people want to organize, maybe people want to long press so they can select multiple items move them
in one go, or allow people to have folders with both notes and their PDF planners. Similarly,
as much as Boox tablets get almost daily use in our household for using Android apps on e-ink,
when it comes to note taking and productivity there are certain features that just don't feel as
thought through for me. For example Boox does have its own tag feature and also has star symbols
but there seems to be no way to do a global search for a tag including in your ebooks and
PDFs and no way to do a global search for these star symbols in your notes and PDFs in one go.
These are both features I rely on when using my Supernote because they mirror how I work with
real paper. I jot down notes in the margins of books or in random and commonplace notebooks and
planners. I'm looking for a way to find all those things later instead of treating them as separate
things. Basically I think the Supernote platform is very consciously designed to feel like using
a notebook but better. Rather than a tablet it feels like the best notebook I've ever had. One of
those features that makes it more than a notebook replacement is the handwriting recognition. I know
a lot of people have been waiting for this feature to even consider this device. You can search your
handwritten notes, either one note or all of them, and also convert your text right on the device to
save as a text or Word file. My disclaimer here is I don't heavily use handwriting recognition,
not only is my handwriting messy the way I take handwritten notes does not translate well to typed
text to put it mildly. So I appreciate the option to just take regular notes without the indexing
which uses up less processing power and battery life and gets me more time between charges. As
mentioned they have added links which I've talked about more in-depth in another video on this
channel and further improved the features I miss the most when on other devices: the ability to
quickly navigate to different headings in one note and to access specific pages, documents or folders
from anywhere on the device. They also improved the Calendar app. You can jot down things in a
monthly or weekly view and most importantly you can view all the notes you created on a certain
day. This would be pretty useful for meeting or other date-bound notes since it's an easy way
to find your notes later. Reading remains pretty basic. While they've improved zoom in PDF, I would
recommend using landscape mode instead of zooming in with pinch to zoom, it's just more convenient.
For things like epubs the reader does the job as well. The Kindle app also works just fine although
I find none of these devices are as snappy as real Kindle. When it comes to the drawing app
I'm not much much of an artist but even I can tell this is a pretty neat little app. It has
a bunch of different pencil and pen options and a soft eraser, and layers. This could be a nice
alternative to keeping a sketchbook on hand. There are definitely some things which I wish they would
add to this platform. One of them is to have your last viewed page as a screen saver. Since e-ink
[screens] only uses power to change an image you could keep one image on there kind of indefinitely
which would be useful to keep a calendar or to- do list on your desk. Something that I also think
would be an easy win is the ability to do straight lines and simple shapes. Since they can already
recognize star marks and convert those this might be a nice way to have an even better note-taking
experience. Overall I think that Supernote has done a great job of not just maintaining their
user experience but improving it in the few years that I've had one and I'm looking forward to
how they're going to make it even better in 2024.
