Note Taking Apps for Samsung Galaxy Fold 5 with S Pen

Maybe you already have this device. Maybe you're looking at this device, the Samsung Z Fold 5, and asking yourself, how do I make an investment in this phone and get a return? Well, one of the big things that really makes this phone worth it for me is the fact that I have a tablet in my pocket, and a phone as well. And I have the ability to use a stylus to take notes. There's something about being able to write something down on your carry that is very efficient, and this device helps you do that. Now, we're today going to talk about three different applications that can help you do just that. We're going to talk about OneNote, Samsung Notes, and Penli. We're going to compare the difference so you can make an informed decision on which is best for you. And if you want to consider purchasing this device, have it already, or maybe have a later edition, like the 3 or the 4, we have a video that we recently did that compares the 5 to the 4, and helps you understand if you should upgrade. But like I said, today we're going to talk about three apps that are really going to help you take great digital notes when you're on the go, and help you access those wherever you are. So stay with me. As we mentioned, we're going to talk about three different applications, OneNote, Samsung Notes, and Penli, and how they differ from one another. First and foremost, when we look at OneNote, OneNote is going to be an application that's going to be universal. In a sense, it's going to work on Windows, Apple, and Android devices, and even some E Ink devices. So if you want to take notes on this device and then jump on your computer, you're going to be able to do that, and they're going to seamlessly sync between the two. Maybe you're someone that is a Samsung fanboy or girl, and you have the Galaxy S23, S22, maybe you have an old Note, you may have this Fold, you have a tablet, or even one of the laptops that Samsung offers. Well, with Samsung Notes, you can take notes on this device, as well as any of those devices, and synchronize across those platforms and devices. So that's really powerful. And maybe you're an Android person, and you want to look at an app that you can take with you across your Android journey, from this device to the next Android device, and that is an app called Penli. So we're going to break down these three apps, and help you understand what is best for you. So first looking at OneNote, and I will say, if you want to learn more about any of these applications, go ahead, jump on our YouTube channel, subscribe, heck, go ahead and like this video if you catch one thing that's worth it for you, and hit that bell for notification, because on our YouTube channel, we have deep dive videos that are going to help you learn how to use these apps in depth, so you can be able to use all the tools and functions. And today we're going to do a quick highlight, so you can see for yourself. So first and foremost, looking at OneNote, OneNote is an application designed by Microsoft, it is a free download, and you can set up a free user account to be able to synchronize those notes. And I can go ahead and open that up here. And I've already installed my planning system, or the app that I use for taking notes. This is the Key to Success Planner, and be straight up with you, I am the creator and founder of the Key to Success Planner. For those that want to learn more about this, go ahead and check out our website. But let's stick to the facts, let's not get into weeds, and let's talk about the actual applications themselves. So inside OneNote, we have the ability to go ahead and have various notebooks. We can go ahead and add more notebooks. So if you have notebooks on your other devices, and you want to be able to open it up on your phone, you can do that. Now it works and looks really good in this open position, but you can also close it and still access those same notebooks and see those same pages as you would on the full screen mode, just a little smaller. You can't write though on the screen, just want to point that out. But again, if you open device back up, we can see that here's a portrait version, we can go ahead and rotate it and make it a landscape version, not too much different. We can also go ahead and pinch to zoom. So back to here, we have our different notebooks, we have our different sections, and we have our different pages within it. So we have daily pages, we have a week out of view, we have a month out of view, and we're able to look at all those different pieces. Now when I go to a daily page, I'm going to actually want to go ahead and make some annotations. Well under the home button, we have the ability to use type. So I can go ahead and I can click on a screen and I can type a note. So I'm just going to put in there type note. That's pretty cool. I also can go ahead and change the cover of that. I can make it bold. I can do a handful of different things with that actual note itself. From here, we can go ahead and go to insert. I can go ahead and tap on the screen. Here, I'm going to be able to do a handful of different things. I can enter in different photos, I can do a recording, I can bring an attachment, I can add a to-do with a checkbox. Makes it kind of fun, right? But I can also go into draw, and what draw is going to allow me to do is really take full functionality of this pen. I'm going to minimize the keyboard here, and I can choose a pen tool, a preset, different colors, different sizes, and I can go ahead and write a note. So I'm just going to go ahead and go in here and write coffee with Tom. And now that I have that note there, maybe I want to highlight that. I can do that by using the highlighter. I can choose to make that a little thicker if I want to, just so it goes a little faster. Heck, I could even go ahead and erase that, and maybe I want to make it a pink color. And one thing I do a lot with digital planning is I choose different colors for different categories in my life. So if it's a work event, it's generally going to be an orange. If it's something personal, I'll put in a yellow. If it's in pink, it's for family. And if it's blue, it's not really critical. Maybe it's like a TV show or something I want to watch, but I just kind of want to notate that. And then maybe I'll use a color for any other calendar events that I'm aware of. For example, if my wife's working that day, or she's picking up the kids, or one of my children have a dentist appointment or something like that, I'll put that in its own color. So I know it's on the calendar, but it's not necessarily in my schedule. What we can do also, we can add lines. So maybe we want to add a line, and that's really cool because you can change the color and make that nice and pink. You could also move that around if you choose to, and we can tap and hit cut, which kind of acts as means to delete. I really like the lasso tool. And why the lasso tool is so cool is I can go ahead and use the lasso tool to select an area type. I can go ahead and I can move that area type. I can also tap on it and hit cut or copy. So I can go ahead and copy, and I can jump to say the next day in my planner, find a new time, and hit paste. And now those notes have carried over from one day to the next day. This is really helpful when you're trying to synchronize and copy over to do's. That makes it really convenient. One thing people commonly ask me in OneNote, especially on Android devices, is how do I go ahead and ink to text? Well, you can go, I'm going to disable my pen tool. I'm going to tap on the screen and bring up my keyboard. Now I have the option, there's different keyboard functions on here, and I can choose different ones. Here I'm going to choose handwriting. And what this is going to allow me to do is give me this screen here. So I could put in here, take notes at, give it a second. And what that just did is that actually went ahead and took my handwritten notes and converted them right to text. So that way I have ink to text on this device. Now the other thing you could do at OneNote, go ahead and allow this to sync to the cloud and pull it up on your desktop application. Use the lasso tool to select the ink and convert the text as well. But if you want to do it directly on a tablet or your phone on a Samsung device, this is the best way to do that. One thing I will tell you, you will need to go into the settings of the S Pen and disable ink to text on some applications, not all applications, but on some applications, because it might not fully function at this time. The last thing I really want to show you is just the ability to use hyperlinks. So I go ahead and hit stop. And now I have these hyperlinks here. And if I go ahead and I want to get to the 10th, I can click on it and hit open link. And it's going to take me to the 10th of the month in this calendar. So OneNote, very powerful app. It allows me to do a lot. I can utilize a screen. I can synchronize across devices. Let's take a look at Samsung Notes and kind of what makes that application stand apart. Keeping in mind, Samsung Notes only synchronizes across Samsung devices at this time. There is some trickery, some hocus pocus stuff that you can do to get Samsung Notes on other devices. If you're really, really smart and you want to do that, or you just want to mess with things, go ahead and try it. There's a whole bunch of Discord content and stuff on Google that'll probably teach you how to do it. I'm not sending you there. Not telling you to go there, but it is out there. Up to you. But if you're sticking with Samsung devices, laptop, tablet, and mobile device, you're going to do just fine. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to choose to open the planner on here. We're using a PDF annotation file that we've imported into the system, which we cover in other videos. But what that is, is it's basically interactive PDF. It's a series of pages in a document, and those pages have been hyperlinked so you can do stuff with them. The first thing you need to know is make sure before you utilize the hyperlinks, you are in reading mode. What that's going to allow you to do is you're going to be able to use our system notification or any other navigation that's been established by any other PDF planner out there. I personally think ours is really cool because we've done some really neat things to help you index your notes and files, which I'll show you in one second. But here at a view page, I can click on any single date. So if I want to go to September 6th, I can click on September 6th and it takes me right there. If I want to get back to that page, I can click on this here and it'll take me back to this page. And from here, if I want to get to March 1st, I can do that and I'm on March 1st. Well, the one thing I said that was really cool is we have this key tab up here. And if you click on key, it's going to take you to basically index sheet of all the different functionality and features that we have available. I told you we have indexing, which a lot of planners don't have. Like when I'm taking notes and I want to learn about like what my wife wants for our anniversary gift. And sometimes I would go on her planner, I write down the different anniversary ideas that I have. It's not a long list, but in her case, maybe she has a long list. Well, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to go zoom in and I'm going to go into pen mode, which we'll talk about these tools here in a minute. But I'm just going to go ahead and click on the pen and I'm going to write anniversary ideas. So that is like a title of my note. I'm going to go back into reading mode and I'm going to click on this one. And that's going to take me to a page in the planner now that is designated just for that note. So I'm just going to write anniversary ideas up here so you can see it. I'm going to go ahead and click on this key tab, go back here. And if I click on right here where it says one, it goes back to this page. So that's really neat. And I think a lot more planners should do that. A lot more interactive files should do that. Gives you the ability to create an index. I do this not just with my notes, but then when I jump into like different projects that I'm working on, as well as different meeting notes that I'm working on, I can easily jump to a meeting page. And here I have my agenda, all my to do's for that meeting. Same thing with projects. I can click on a project and it'll show me the timelines and different things I need to do within that project. So I think that's a big feature. It helps me stay organized. But let's talk about other things that you can do with Samsung Notes. And one of the things I think is most powerful is a lot of times when I'm in, say, my notes section, I'm going to go back to key and I'm going to go to notes here. Maybe, maybe this list is a lot longer than I expected, like a lot longer. Well, if I click on this page here, I can come in here and now I have all these different pages available and you can see the page that I'm on because it's highlighted in red. I can click on these three dots and I can basically add a page and I can do so and I can choose to have one of the default pages or I can go back, click on the dots and hit copy, click on the dots again and hit paste. And what it'll do is it'll actually put a second note page right behind the first note page. And just to show you how neat that is, this is the page that we're on. I'm going to jump here and I'm just going to write a big two here and write a one here. And then for this is the new page. I'm going to write new. Well, watch what's really neat about this. I'm going to disable, go into my key page and type the one. You can see for the anniversary ideas that are there. If I swipe, you can see the new page. It copied over anniversary ideas because I copied a page I already made an index to. But what's exciting is if I click on two, which is a page we haven't touched before, it took me to the page that was next to my index. So you can use that index to make multiple note pages on a particular topic. You can also take these note pages and copy them behind projects or meeting pages. And that's one thing that's really neat about Samsung notes and using a PDF annotation app. In OneNote, you can do the same thing. You just have to copy pages and paste them below in OneNote. But with the hyperlinks feature kind of helps keep it a little more organized. So going back into reading mode, I'm going to pick on a date here. Let's go to January 2nd. I have some stuff that I've already written on here, but we'll expand on that. So across the top, we have the ability to type. We have, which we talked a little bit about, we have all these different tools that we can use for different pens, pencils. You can adjust thickness. You can also change colors. You can add favorites, which gives you a lot of different options for creativity when it comes to pens. Same thing when highlighting goes, you have all these different functionalities. You can even change opacity, which I think is really important because I can change the opacity and I can come over here and I can do a light color there. And versus if the opacity was a little thicker, you would see that the highlighting would be more dominant. So food for thought on that. The other thing I think that's really neat is if I basically click and hold, it'll draw straight lines in Samsung Notes. So a lot of times when I'm drawing a line, it doesn't look very good. But if I click and hold, it'll snap and make it straight. And I think that's really neat. When it comes to the eraser, there's a couple of different functions that I think are really cool. You can erase the stroke area, which what that does is it erases the whole line. And you can see when I click there, it erased the whole line. I can do erase highlighter only. And that's so cool is maybe I have all these handwritten notes, so I don't want to erase my notes. I can come in here and it will erase just the highlighted portion of my notes. So if you marked a bunch of stuff, or maybe you're going to move the calendar around or change colors, you can easily do that. And then it has a select tool. Again, I can use this select tool to select the text. I can move it. I can also cut it, copy it, move it over. But with Samsung Notes, we have the ability to convert the text. So right here, previously I wrote write a note. I'm going to select that and hit convert to text. And you're going to see right here, it says write a note and I can hit convert. And now it converts that to text. So you have that ability native. The other thing you can do with Samsung Notes is I can actually ink the text. So let's just say I'm on one of these pages, go into reading mode, move here, and then go into ink the text. I'm going to tap there to get a cursor to show up. I'm just going to write a note across the screen. And you can see it went ahead and converted that text for me right there. A bunch of different other features as far as shapes, locking a page, using the undoes, but it gives you a premise on how to use Samsung Notes and what makes that application functional. Keep in mind, it synchronizes only across Samsung devices, unless you have that trickery that you went looking for. So the other one we're going to talk about is Penly. It's a friendly little app and it looks like this. The toolbar navigation system is slightly the same, but yet I think the UI is a little scaled back than Samsung Notes. It doesn't have the development and the colors and functions, but it still has a lot of the same tools. And it has one tool that's going to blow your mind that I think if Samsung Notes or any other PDF annotation app would introduce, would just like take them to the next level. And that's what makes this application really exciting for me. And we'll talk about what that is in a minute. But I'm going to kind of cruise through a bunch of the things to kind of tell you, not to bore you at all, but same type of things. If you want to hyperlink, navigation works the same way. You can click on different hyperlinks throughout this plan or any other planner. It has the ability to pinch and zoom. One nice feature is I can actually lock a page. And what's nice then is if I'm writing now, that page isn't going to move on me and it keeps it locked. I really do like that feature and I can go ahead and unlock that just as easily. But I jumped ahead a little bit. So we have kind of the same functionality where we can go to this viewer here. We can go to this viewer and here we have the ability to copy pages if we would choose to do so, like we did in Samsung Notes. I have the ability to add pages. I also have the ability to mark them up with a pen. Now I don't have all the pen selection like I did in Samsung Notes, but I still can go ahead and choose a couple different variations. I do have the ability to click on different lines and different sizes there and I can kind of keep these here as a default if I want to jump between thicknesses. And then I have color options and I can create favorites and shortcuts for those as well. Highlighter, same scenario, a couple different options. I can kind of create and save a variation for myself that I want to use as well as I have different colors that I can choose to use through my highlighting experience. You can also see that there is a web number here too. So if you want to be real particular about your colors you can do that. Highlighter works the same way. It has the ability to make adjustments. The eraser works the same way. It has the ability to make those adjustments as you expected, but it doesn't have the ability to resize them. So you just have three sizes to work with. But you can go through and have a little bit more control. You can erase your drawing, your highlighting, text, shape, images, links, group, as well as any locked items. So that gives you flexibility to know exactly what you're erasing when you do so. And then we have the ability to add text just as we would. So I can go ahead and click on the text tool, tap on the screen, and if I want to I'm going to pull up my keyboard here just as we did before and I'm going to write a note. And that will go ahead and convert that to text as we did in Samson Notes as well as OneNote. Again, Samson Notes also has the ability to do it native as well. So that is a quick look at Penly. Let's talk about that feature that I told you was so amazing. So one thing that I often do when it comes to digital planning, I generally don't do it on Saturdays, but let's just say I want to have a meeting. Meeting, bring my font down a little bit, meeting with Tom. And I'm just going to say it's going to be our meeting. I'm going to go ahead and highlight that so you have an idea when that is. Now I'm going to go ahead and go to my meeting page here. I'm going to write meeting with Tom and go ahead and click on this page here. And this right here is my meeting. I'm just going to write meeting across there. And I'm going to go ahead and click on this little button here. And that page number, if you look real close, is 637. That's a magical number. We're going to remember that. 637. So I'm going to go back to the date that I was on. And I'm going to go ahead and choose this button here. And I am going to put a box there. Tap here and click hyperlink. And now it's asking me for a page link or a web link. And I'm going to hit page link. And I'm going to put in 637 and hit done. Hit okay. Now what do you think is going to happen when I disable this and simply tap on this meeting note? It takes me to my actual meetings page. So that way you can go through your planner and you can write out all your different appointments and you can hyperlink to different projects, different notes, different meeting pages. Maybe in your daily page you have a list of your to-dos that are from a project. You could hyperlink to those. Maybe you want to build better habits and when you use our habit tracker you want to create hyperlinks. You can do that with Penly. You can also do that with OneNote but not as easy. And you can't do it at all at this time with Samsung Notes. So there you have it guys and gals. There's three powerful applications that you can use for digital note-taking on your phone. 5, 4, 3 or any Samsung Android device for that matter. As well as you can use a couple of these applications across other Android or Windows devices and even Mac if you're using OneNote for that matter. So I hope this gave you a little bit of insight on different ways to do digital planning, note-taking and give you some clarity on how to just utilize your device so you get the most out of it. If you learned just one thing, do me a favor. Hit the like button. If you want to learn more about tech, digital planning, increasing your productivity, go ahead subscribe to the channel. And if you want to learn about that planner that I soft-sold you in the beginning and used throughout the video, go ahead check out the description. I'll have a link to that. If you have a real question, please ask it myself or somebody in the community. I know we'll reach out to you personally and help you along this journey. With that being said, I'm Brandon Bonafer. It's been a pleasure to speak with you for the last few minutes and Lord willing, we'll get to see each other in the next video. So God bless each and every one of you.