Upgrade StorageTablet: Whether/which to buy for split tablet/PC workflow?
Hi all, hoping for some advice. I usually use Zotero on Windows PC; my document annotating usually mostly consists of colour-coded highlights with occasional typed comments and limited actual hand-writing/drawing. I am increasingly finding this difficult on PC as highlighting repeatedly with a mouse is hard on my hands.
I am considering buying a tablet to enable a more natural writing-style ability to highlight and more position/work location options without having to physically print documents. I keep hearing iPad is the way to go but am on the fence between iPad and Surface. Is it very difficult to get files to sync between a tablet (where I would be annotating) and my computer (where I would want to pull up highlighted documents to reference as I write assignments)? Are there any particular complications with working between an iPad and a Windows computer, or is it not an issue if it's all just pulling from Zotero's cloud storage...? Any advice/personal experience on optimizing this kind of workflow would be very helpful. Thanks!
I am considering buying a tablet to enable a more natural writing-style ability to highlight and more position/work location options without having to physically print documents. I keep hearing iPad is the way to go but am on the fence between iPad and Surface. Is it very difficult to get files to sync between a tablet (where I would be annotating) and my computer (where I would want to pull up highlighted documents to reference as I write assignments)? Are there any particular complications with working between an iPad and a Windows computer, or is it not an issue if it's all just pulling from Zotero's cloud storage...? Any advice/personal experience on optimizing this kind of workflow would be very helpful. Thanks!
I was in a somewhat similar situation a while ago: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/126435/zotero-on-mobile-ipad-air-6-13-2024-m2-or-pro-2018-2020-2021-12-9-or-android-oneplus-pad-3 . I do prefer the Android ecosystem to iOS (and I like the S Pen much more than Apple's pencil or its clones). But I ended up going with an iPad and I am glad I did as the experience with Zotero is superb. Exactly: not an issue at all. My N=2 experience: my daughter runs Linux + iPad, with Zotero's paid storage, and it is just seamless: annotations on a pdf show almost instantly on her desktop Zotero. I use WebDAV for storage and it is just the same. One can also annotate while off-line and it syncs as soon as one gets back on-line. Of course, the above assumes you are using Zotero for annotation of PDFs/epubs/snapshots. I used a Surface Go2 for a while, initially with Windows then Linux. Keeping/syncing Zotero stuff and its annotations is, again, seamless (as Zotero takes care of it). But I find the experience a lot worse than the iPad (or Android), both because for my taste the OSes are not as polished for tablet-like devices, and because I think the mobile Zotero apps (iPad, Android) are better suited for how one interacts with the annotation tools in a tablet-form device. So regarding I think the iPad is a much better choice for both. And, as for @bwiernik, especially for handwriting.
Is there something to miss when using the iOS app, compared to the desktop? Adding new entries, including grabbing snapshots, PDFs, etc, is still more capable in the desktop program ---though this is becoming easier on iOS too. But, to me, this occasional limitation would not justify at all the constant much better usability under iOS for reading and annotation work.
Finally As said above, if you're using Zotero for your PDFs/epubs/snapshots and their annotations, syncing is not an issue at all: it just works seamlessly across devices. For other files outside Zotero, the iOS-non-Mac-computer syncing is more complicated. But there are various sync options available (I don't use iCloud myself, but there are plenty of alternatives depending on your needs; if the focus is Zotero work, for occasional sharing of a few files there are lots of options and even just using whatsapp will do).