[Galaxy Note 10.1 Themes and Apps] sarah11918:
All are still good. I've used Quill and Papyrus pretty much as long as I've owned my tablet and recently downloaded Write to try. Lecture Notes happens to be free today in the Amazon App store, so I've just downloaded that but haven't yet used it. Since I don't have tons of notes that need to be grouped or organized, my preferences are based on actually using the apps, not how well they function as a complete system. So take into account if you need this app to also be more like an Evernote or complete storage system, you might value the apps differently than I do.

Quill isn't actively being worked on, and has fewer features and pretty much non-existent organization of notes. But I find it the nicest to actually use if all I want to do is write from scratch. I just like how it's organized, how the menus work, the writing experience, the palm rejection, the eraser settings etc. Notes export just fine to Evernote, to a directory, or to several other Android app the same way the "share" button typically works, and so I export and organize pdfs outside of the app.

Papyrus is my go-to if I need to import a pdf (paid add-on to get this feature). It's also quite good, but I do find it just slightly clunkier to use than Quill. I'm often making little mistakes I need to correct because I'm expecting it to act like Quill, but it doesn't. If I could only have one app, it would have to be Papyrus just because I do need the ability to annotate pdfs in addition to writing notes from scratch. But it always seems *just* a tad more effort to use than Quill. Not enough to be a big deal, but enough to notice that I'm not using Quill. Papyrus was just updated a few days ago, so this is an entirely full-featured, current app that does everything I need it to do. It has some basic note organization which is certainly better than nothing and perfectly sufficient for my needs. I *like* it, I just wish it felt more like Quill while I was using it.

I've had Write for a few weeks and used it a bit. The web view is useful if you would use that (top part of your screen is a browser, then your document is beneath, for you to take notes while on a web page). The "insert space" feature is completely unintuitive, and I still can't figure out how to use it properly, but the "lasso mode" to circle and move text around works as expected, and is a welcome feature that I only recently learned Papyrus has and wish that Quill had! I think in general, I just don't find it the easiest thing to use. It has a lot of menu items, some of which don't intuitively make sense. I think I would have to use it a lot more to actually feel comfortable using it, although it does a lot of things. I've been using software like this since my old tablet PCs 10 years ago, and still I feel like there's a lot of "figuring out" how the developer meant this app to work required to use it. But, it's free! :) Zooming works well, and you can export to PDF but not import a PDF. It doesn't appear to have been updated since 2013, but then again, neither has Quill and I have no hesitation recommending that one, provided you're OK with a limited feature set and primarily want a smooth writing experience.

I've only just downloaded lecture notes today but I know this is a very popular app and was updated earlier this month. It felt like over kill to me when I tested the free trial version years ago. And even just launching it today, I'm finding all the various menu options and settings a little overwhelming. I didn't feel like I could just pick up and go with this one, although if I dedicated myself to learning and using it, I'd probably appreciate all the customization possible. I tried to find a few basic settings that I know I like (eg stroke erase) and the first hurdle seems to be that it doesn't support that. But, the "cutter" feature (like the "lasso" of Write) works very well and I can see myself using that. You can't initially import pdf files, but have to download their free PDFview app. Once I did that, the menu option to import PDF appeared, but it's kind of a weird PDF import. Instead of actually writing on the PDF (like other apps do), you import maybe a graphic of the pdf (?) because it shows up in the way an imported image would, in a smaller box with the ability to resize it. Trying to resize the PDF to a full page made the original pdf text a little fuzzy. So, I'm not exactly pleased with that compared to Papyrus, but I need to be a little pickier about having original-quality looking PDFs that I can then annotate. Also, that imported PDF doesn't become the background like it does in Papyrus, but rather I found that when I went to erase something, I erased the underlying PDF, too. I think LectureNotes supports multiple layers, so if you go to the trouble of figuring that out, then I would assume you could protect that layer, or only edit layers on top of it. Sorry if this all sounds negative, and certainly I have very little experience with this app so most of this really speaks to how user-friendly it initially seems coming from other apps, and not an indication of how someone well-versed in the app experiences it.

If you must restrict yourself to one app, and PDF import is important to you, I think it has to be Papyrus. Of course, since Write is free, you don't have to restrict yourself to just one. Try Write and maybe it's good enough for you. It's difficult to recommend Quill if you care about organizing the original notes because you do just get one mess of files. But things export nicely, and it's the one I'm happiest actually writing with, if all I'm doing is handwriting notes. My initial reaction opening Lecture Notes is that I don't like it compared to the others, and I don't immediately see what I get from it that I don't from Papyrus. But it's free today, so if you happen to see this then grab it for yourself from Amazon.