10.31 Activity - Scribe It

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the thirty-first day of the month is "Activity."

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After reading Kaelyn's post about the Kindle Scribe, I talked to my husband about it and expressed some interest in going to Best Buy or the equivalent to check one out. I was interested in the idea of replacing my paper and pencil journal for goal tracking and have everything in one location. Well, then he surprised me by buying one for me for my birthday!

It's an interesting tablet that you can use as a Kindle for reading, but you can also create documents (what they call notebooks) where you can write notes. Those notes can be accessed as PDFs via your online Kindle storage or you can share them via email. Unfortunately, PDF is really the only export version of your notes, so if you wanted to add to your digital file after you've moved it off the Kindle, there's no real way to do that. 

And that's basically all that functionality that the Kindle Scribe has. It's a combo of a Kindle Paperwhite plus some built-in templates for notebooks. 

Here you can see what it looks like if you're using it to read books. Just like a regular Kindle, you can adjust font size and the backlight. You can also add handwritten sticky notes to your books (as well as typing notes like you would in a regular Kindle). I think the handwritten notes is the only functionality for reading that the Scribe has that  Paperwhite does not.

Unfortunately, the templates for the notebooks are pretty limited. There were eighteen available and most of them were just variants of grids (see above). I didn't see a template that could replace the bullet-type journal I use to track my goals, so I would basically have had to create it from scratch like I do in my paper and pencil version. I imagine in another two or three generations, Amazon will have added many more templates because there's real room for improvement here.

Also, oddly enough, despite the fact that I thought the Scribe was pretty big out of the box (Amazon says 10.2" display as compared to the 6.8" of the Paperwhite), I also thought that some of the templates weren't large enough. For example, the calendar (pictured above) would have been a lot better if it had used the space in a landscape-orientation and taken out the lines below it. As it stands, the boxes aren't large enough for my handwriting to be particularly useful. 

I will also say that it was heavier than I expected and using it to read was unwieldy. I'm definitely used to the smaller size of my Paperwhite and holding this in my hand was as cumbersome as reading a big hardcover novel. 

So I played around with it for a bit, but in the end I decided it wasn't worth the hefty price ($339 for a basic model, plus an upgrade for a nicer pen and a case) and sent it back. Maybe in another few years I'll reevaluate to see if they have made changes to make more suitable for my needs, but for now I think I'm going to be sticking with with my paper journal and my Paperwhite.

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Have you seen the Scribe? Do you think it would be useful for you?