the curious case of galaxy note

I've been an iPhone user since a long time, and its still the best mobile phone platform, specially because of the ecosystem.

This is an article that is coming from years of experimentation of what runs and ruins productivity, describing my frustration why iPhone hasn't been able to fill in the most important aspect of productivity. Note taking.

I've bought all the apple devices, and definitely iPads are still the best note taking device in tablet form factor, and iPhone, with its ecosystem still provides the most seamless user experience for any creative or knowledge worker out there.

But,

When you need to jot down a small little something, and you don't have anything but your phone, its a terrible experience.

I can't emphasize more, the importance of being able to take notes on your phone.

And although I've hated on Samsung devices for the longest in past, but I can't deny; even if they dont have an ecosystem anywhere close to iPhone, they take notes extremely well.

I have tried all the popular third party stylus with iPhone, and nothing can compare to a proper EMR based stylus like spen on galaxy note phones.

I even have gone to extremem such as, actually designing a small 3d printed capacitive stylus for iPhones, so, you gotta take my word for it. Although it works better than any other capacitive stylus experiences, but well, capacitive stylus and EMR / Wacom based stylus are a class apart.

I guess my solution here would be same as what I did on pre-apple-silicon era with my macbook. Because Apple wasn't releasing powerful machines for my dev work, I replaced it with a powerful linux based workstation. I lost many of the ecosystem comfort, but I won many things.

Similar to that, however wasteful it might be, I think I will have to buy a samsung note device, maybe an older model to save some money on features that I really dont need. The solution isn't elegant, but this is what it is, untill Apple releases an iPhone with apple pencil support or something like that.

Till then, I guess I have to get used to having two phones.