iPP 9.7" For Veterinary Student

[MilleDav01]

Hi Everyone,

I've posted a lot about taking digital notes, but I finally got accepted to vet school *Yay*, and now that the 9.7 inch iPad pro is out, I'm thinking of making the purchase along with the apple pencil. For the people that use the pencil, how do you feel about notes? I do not draw (well) so that wouldn't be my primary concern.

Uses:

-Take notes with Pencil
-All text books are digital

Also, side note, what color? I love them all (Besides silver), I'm a guy (like that matters), have a Space Grey iPhone 6s Plus (which I won't be using because Ill be international, outside of iMessage). I like the rose gold, but not sure if its "professional" enough, but I guess I could get a case

Any bits of wisdom would be amazing! Thank You!

 

[ZBoater]

I would recommend signing up for a Twitter account.

 

[Cascades42]

I'm in computer science so from that angle totally different, however I recently bought myself a 12.9" pro for university work and am loving using it with the pencil. I've barely done any drawing so far (I'm a mediocre artist), but have spent hours doing work on it with the pencil and 100% recommend it. I've been using notability which has a cutting tool so you can move your notes around after writing them which has come in useful more than once!

I picked silver, I am female but felt that the silver looked good without being too eye-catching - there are a lot of surface pros around and they tend to be silver so this blends in. My mother got the space grey but she works in insurance.

I highly recommend getting Notability for notes, and liquid text for PDFs - you can squish parts of the PDF together to allow you to compare sections that aren't right next to each other easily. Those and Sidefari are very frequently used apps on my iPads.

The only other thing I would say is seriously consider whether the 12.9" might be a better fit. You can have a whole page of a document open in full screen, which means when doing side by side things are still definitely readable and writing is doable - something I struggled with on my air 2 (not using the pencil, just a cheap stylus).

The Smart Keyboard is well worth looking at - no charging required which is excellent, and I find mine very nice to use. Of course, it's not the same as a regular keyboard and I'm far from a keyboard snob, but I'd recommend looking at it at least. A keyboard of some kind should definitely be on your serious consideration list in my opinion.

Another app I'll recommend, assuming you're new to iOS is GoodReader. It's ugly but powerful, you can sync with almost any cloud storage provider or server, including double sync (which they warn you not to do, but I do anyway because I have multiple backups), and you can organise things into folders, etc. Plus it has a download manager and can handle zipped files.

Good luck with your course!

 

[mobutt]

I think the gold iPhone is ugly but something about the gold iPad is eye catching. Needless to say I recommend gold, that's what I brought.

 

[Farrellcollie]

I use the apple pencil to take notes all the time and to mark up papers on my 12 IPP. I don't draw at all except doodle sorts of things when in really boring meetings. The split screen means I have one side open to take notes and one side for my doodles. I think the 9.7 will be a good size to carry around and take notes on - particularly if your text books are in a format that you can take notes with. I always choose silver as the color because I like the white bezel. I guess gold would work too because I always use a case so I would not see it.

 

[mpetrides]

First of all, congratulations!

I'd recommend the 12.9--especially since the WIFI 128 GB model can be gotten for $799 from Staples right now--and Best Buy will price match that. The larger screen size is preferable for newspapers, magazines, annotating journal articles and I suspect it will be better for the kind of textbooks a vet student will be using. I use GoodNotes to import PDFs of articles or handouts from meetings and highlight/annotate them using the Pencil.

I'm a physician and retired medical educator. If asked by a prospective medical student I would recommend the 12.9 over the 9.7 for those reasons and also because the 4GB RAM and faster CPU speed will likely provide a better experience when using two apps side-by-side (the A9x in the 9.7 is underclocked in comparison with the same chip in the 12.9). In fact, the 12.9 is essentially two 9.7s side-by-side when you hold the 12.9 in landscape and the 9.7s in portrait. It is REALLY nice to be able to have two full-sized apps running side by side.

I find the weight isn't a real problem, except when the keyboard is attached--it feels like it almost doubles the weight. So I just remove the keyboard unless I'm planning on doing a lot of typing or am planning on carrying the IPP and want screen protection. I got used to the larger size very quickly but I've always read with my iPad propped against my abdomen or my thighs. I've had my IPP since the day they came out and use it for virtually everything--particularly note-taking and highlighting/annotation using the Pencil.

 

[MilleDav01]

Thanks everyone I am grateful for the help!