Home » Tech Reviews » 10 Best Digital Notepads of 2023 | Electronic Notebooks & More [Updated]

10 Best Digital Notepads of 2023 | Electronic Notebooks & More [Updated]

Matthew

If you’re anything like us at Pixelsmith, you’re a hands-on kinda person who likes to be able to work, sketch, jot notes and plan in a natural manner. But, you still be able to organize all your handwritten notes and store everything as digital files. Until a few years ago, this wasn’t really possible, or at least not ideal. Now, however, we’ve been proverbially saved by some of the best digital writing pads.

Coming in all different shapes, sizes, and mechanisms, these notepads are a fairly new innovation on the tech scene. But they’ve started to catch on, and we’ve seen some interesting and innovative variations for the best digital notepads. These notepads serve all kinds of functions, from direct to digital notes, sketches that you can store both on paper and digitally, and even screens that feel and bend like paper. The possibilities are simply endless.

We’ve put together this guide to our ten favorite digital notepads of the year, all with their own pros and cons and special nifty features. We’ve chosen some top picks, compared them all by size, price, features, and then we reviewed each one individually with their pros and cons so you can find the best digital notepads for you. You might also be interested in these pen display tablets while you are here.

TLDR

Best Digital Notepad for Sketches

Unsurprisingly, Wacom’s Bamboo Slate comes in on top when we’re looking at digital notepads for sketching. It’s responsive and accurate in terms of pen strokes and sketching style and is one of the perfect ways to begin your creative process by hand, and easily transfer it to the digital workspace.

Following Wacom’s long history of making great tablets, pads, and various styles of digital sketching devices, the Bamboo Slate keeps this trend of quality products from Wacom going. Some other amazing notepads include:

• Iskn The Slate 2+
• Boox Note Air 2 10.3

Our Favourite Digital Writing Pad

The UGEE U Series is our top pick for a digital note-taking pad. We liked how it’s straightforward and easy to use, and when paired with an Android or iOS device via Bluetooth, all our notes or sketches show up immediately in real-time, where we could edit or adjust them.

This we found is a great way of organising and storing your writing while still being able to jot down notes by hand. Some other amazing digital writing pads include:

• Boogie Board Blackboard
• Rocketbook Everlast Reusable Notebook
• Rocketbook Wave Smart Notebook
• Newyes Robot Pad

Best Electronic Notepad Pen of 2023

The Moleskine Pen+ is a pretty innovative creation from one of the most common household names in ‘analogue’ notepads.

Featuring a design that doesn’t look all that different from the original Moleskine pens, which clip onto the covers of their notebooks, we think that the Pen+ Ellipse is a technological advancement like no other.

We liked that it had an infrared camera alongside the pen tip allowing for it to trace and track all of our handwritten notes, sketches, and drawings. These can then be transferred to your device either live or whenever you’re ready to connect. The ink tip in the pen is simple, tiny, and replaceable. And the pen itself also has a comfortable triangle shape. In addition, it comes together with one of the best digital notebooks we could find. Other notable combinations include:

• Boox Note Air 2 10.3

Best Digital Notebooks Compared

Here is a quick breakdown of our journey to find the best digital writing pad for those who need it yesterday. But, read on for our more in-depth reviews of the different notebooks with some remarkable alternatives that we tested for digital devices.

Digital Notepad	Best For	Image	Price	Overall	Check Price
reMarkable Paper Tablet	All-Round		$$$	8/10	Click to Buy
Wacom Bamboo Slate Smartpad	Art		$$$	9/10	Click to Buy
UGEE 11.9 Inch Drawing Tablet	All-Round		$$	8/10	Click to Buy
Boogie Board Blackboard	Notes		$$	8/10	Click to Buy
Rocketbook Smart Reusable Notebook	Work / School		$	9/10	Click to Buy
iskn The Slate 2+	Art		$$$	7/10	Click to Buy
Moleskine Pen+ Smart Writing Set	All-Round		$$$	7/10	Click to Buy
Newyes Robot Pad	Notes		$	6/10	Click to Buy
Rocketbook Wave Smart Notebook	Notes		$	7/10	Click to Buy
BOOX Note Air 2 10.3	Work / School		$$$	8/10	Click to Buy

Top Digital Notepad Reviews

These are our favourite digital notepads in no particular order. You’ll notice they each have a handy short list of their main attributes or focuses that we found, as well as a pros and cons list underneath each product. This should help you get an idea of each tablet at a glance.

Wacom Bamboo Slate Smartpad Review

• Screen Size: Up to A4 size
• Battery Life: 12 Hours
• Operating System: Windows 8
• Pen Included: Yes
• Memory Size: N/A

Wacom is well known for their digital drawing tablets, both those with and without screens. They’re the leader in this field, with most professionals working choosing their graphics tablet and using Wacom products almost exclusively. With the Bamboo Slate Smartpad, Wacom haven’t stopped short of their usual excellence even in their venture into this new field with their electronic writing pad.

We found the slate itself, underneath your drawing or writing pad, is the mechanical factor here in conjunction with the pen. All we had to do was simply place our pad and draw or write as we usually would. We liked how the Slate uses electromagnetic tracking and pressure sensitivity to record our movements and super accurately reflect them on our synced devices.

It’s a nice balance of working digitally we think, yet still with analog tools that we are familiar and comfortable with. Think traditional how this will capture handwritten notes on paper while also copying them electronically.

The Bamboo Slate Smartpad is aimed to be a creative tool more than anything else. How you use it creatively, however, is totally up to you. We found the app is great for handwriting-to-text transcription, accessing our saved notes on the cloud, and great search functionality. In addition, we loved how we could export any of our notes to a number of file formats for different graphics and design software.

UGEE U Series Drawing Monitor Review

• Screen Size: 9”
• Battery Life: Plugged-in power supply
• Reusable: Yes
• Pen Included: Yes
• Memory Size: N/A

Bringing something a little different to our review, this UGEE U Series is a great alternative to the more traditional digital writing pad. We liked how it worked straight away whether we had it connected to our Mac or Windows computer. Not only did we enjoy it for this reason but we loved the versatility that this smart writing pad offers.

We feel that this is one of the best digital writing pads on the market as it let us not only take down notes but we could also do a little editing and design work as well. The screen is a good size with a quality resolution and sRGB. This makes it a great tablet for Photoshop as well. With the push of a button we discovered we could change between a pen and an eraser. We noticed that it acts as more of an input device with a screen instead of an independent device with its own functionality.

The downside that we didn’t really enjoy was the fact that it has to be tethered to another device to be used. The stylus does require a battery but there is an option for a battery-free version but overall, it does feel as if we were writing on paper, which is what we were looking for.

Boogie Board Backboard Writing Tablet With Stylus Review

• Screen Size:5” x 11”
• Battery Life: Life of the product
• Reusable: Yes
• Pen Included: No
• Memory Size: None

The Boogie Board Writing Tablet is a little step back from the digital notepads we’ve already looked at in terms of its aims. It’s meant to be simple and straightforward – you write notes, you share them onto your device if you need them, and you start another note.

We’d imagine it would fit best as part of a classroom, or teaching program, or for use on-site in various professions in place of a simple analog notepad. We liked its slick black display with bright, light writing making it easy to read in any environment. Our notes were easy to share to our device via the Blackboard app.

We discovered that a small coin battery will power the device for its lifespan. We tested the sturdy, child-friendly build and small form factor which makes for easy transporting, allowing us to easily take it wherever we needed to go. It’s a simple eWriter, but a good one, and if you’re looking for something simple then this is likely the one for you.

The only downside is that it is somewhat of a one-use pad that will last until the battery runs out. Although it can be replaced, we noticed that the longevity of this writing pad is not the longest.

Rocketbook Everlast Reusable Notebook Review

• Screen Size: 5” x 11”
• Battery Life: No battery needed
• Reusable: Yes
• Pen Included: Yes
• Memory Size: 32 Page book

The Everlast notebook from Rocketbook is a hot take on digital writing tablets. We liked how it comes in at an incredible price point but we noticed how it sacrifices some functionality for the price. However, Rocketbook has found great workarounds to a lot of these issues we picked up duroing our testing of this digital writing pad.

We discovered how it uses a combination of a Frixion erasable pen and a phone app for scanning pages. Once we drew anything or tried to writes notes to completion, we then scanned them into the app and wiped the page clean with the included cloth – pretty neat we think.

Each page also has seven different symbols along the bottom, which we found we could assign to apps like Drive, Email, Evernote or Slack. A simple selection of one of these symbols instantly sends your current note to the desired destination. We loved how this made our workflow a lot quicker and easier by sending our handwritten notes or doodles quickly.

You can, however, use any pens (including colour) in this notebook, which we think makes it great for the creative on the go. If you’re looking for a quick and cheap way to take notes by hand and store them digitally with a real paper feel, then this is the best digital notebook for you. It’s not terribly fancy or finicky, but in our opinion, very effective and useful for what it does as a digital notepad.

iskn The Slate 2+ Review

• Screen Size: 5” x 7.3”
• Battery Life: 7 Hours
• Reusable: Yes
• Pen Included: Yes
• Memory Size: N/A

The Slate 2+ is a pretty standard take on a digital notepad and falls somewhere between the Everlast and SmartPad in terms of how it works. We noticed that it is quite popular among artists, more so than those looking for the best digital paper tablet for the office or school, at least.

We liked that it’s a sturdily built tablet that works with all our own pens and pencils, not requiring any fancy digital pressure sensitive pen to use it with. It takes paper up to 0.27” in thickness, which we could clip in and align, and simply go ahead and draw on or start our note taking.

We used the included Bluetooth sync or USB cable that came with the digital notebook on the Slate 2 to then sync it to our computer and personal devices, to watch and edit our creations in real-time. You can also use it standalone and sync your creations at a later stage if you wanted to. We could use it with a stylus as a regular drawing tablet with Photoshop, Illustrator, and other similar programs while it is tethered to our computer or tablet, something that we liked.

We noticed that the battery lasts for around 7 hours and the Imagink app that it comes with offers a great selection of different artsy tools for drawing whatever you desire, a feature we discovered and liked quite a lot. Ultimately, we this it’s a great choice for those with a focus on art and design, and will easily find its place in your regular creative setup as it’s incredibly versatile, with functionality that can be tailored to your personal needs.

We love how unique this tablet is, we could draw with a real pencil, all you need to do is add the iskn ring around our real pen. Which we found to be super easy and quick to do. Everyone has their favourite writing tool and we were happy to be able to use ours with this digital notebook.

Moleskine Pen+ Smart Writing Set Review

• Screen Size: 5” x 11”
• Battery Life: Lifespan
• Reusable: No
• Pen Included: Yes
• Memory Size: 176 Pages

So, as we previously mentioned, the Moleskine Pen+ works in two parts with the pen forming one, and their smart notebook forming the other. This means we couldn’t effectively use either of them independently, but together the set is a quality piece of innovative digital notepad tech. Overall, we liked the different feel of the Moleskin Smart set when it comes to electronic notebooks, making our digital writing and note taking feel as natural as possible.

We noticed that when writing or drawing, the pen uses an infrared sensor to detect our movements across the dotted Ncoded paper in the diary. When we synced with the Moleskine Notes app, we could transfer all our notes and sketches to organise and edit them digitally. The thing we liked the most was the handwriting-to-text transcription features, colour editing options and more, that are all stored on the app and connect to an Android device. When it comes to electronic notebooks, this is a remarkable tablet in our opinion.

Our strokes were also be paired with real-time audio, again making this a great tool to use for instructional or tutorial purposes while we did a little digital writing and took it to another level. We discovered how easy it is to export and share our notes as PDFs, images, vectors or text files. Although we think this digital notebook probably still best used as a fun drawing pad and a breakaway from solely using digital or analog for these kinds of purposes.

The included stylus pen will need an ink refill from time to time but that is a trade-off for the paper like experience. The writing area is a good enough size and is the perfect tool we think for quick notes or a pleasant journal writing experience.

Unfortunately, we could’t save any files to vector format which could be a problem for specific actions but still makes this digital notepad one of the great tools available. A feature that we loved the most was the ability to recognize 15 different languages and that it will sync with our Google drive as well to save all our digital writing documents.

Something that we didn’t really like is that while this is a digital notepad, the pages in the book themselves are normal and once filled, we had to buy a new electronic notebook from Moleskin.

Newyes Robot Pad Review

• Screen Size:5”
• Battery Life: 6 Months
• Reusable: Yes
• Pen Included: Yes
• Memory Size: 1 Page

The Robot Pad from Newyes is essentially just a digital whiteboard that we used as a digital writing pad. It’s got one-use note functionality, meaning that it didn’t store our notes anywhere, nor sync them, but simply is a place to write things down, then erase and repeat. In many ways, it’s like the Boogie Board, only in a simpler form. When it comes to digital writing pads, this is probably the most basic one out there with there being better tablets for note taking.

We liked its super thin design and that it weighs nearly nothing, allowing for easy carry and use on the go (ie. for shopping lists, or something for kids to draw on in a restaurant). We noticed that it comes with two big magnets on the back so we could attach it to our fridge, something another electronic writing pad hasn’t been able to do.

It’s plain and simple, with no frills, and we found isn’t really a work or productivity-focused tool. It would be best used simply as a digital writing pad, or as something for children to sketch on on car rides or on an airplane. We think that you could even use it for notes at a talk or something similar. Although be warned – the erase button clears everything, so don’t write anything important on it that you might forget as we found out the hard way.

Rocketbook Wave Smart Electronic Notebook With Pen Review

• Screen Size: 8.5” x 9.5”
• Battery Life: No Battery
• Reusable: Yes, limited number
• Pen Included: Yes
• Memory Size:

We found the Rocketbook Wave is an interesting variation on their Everlast notebook. While not fully reusable, like the Everlast is, its mechanisms still piqued our interest and we felt it deserved a place on this list. This was not only because of the name brand, but also because we think that some of the tech in this electronic notepad could serve interesting uses in the future.

Unlike the Everlast, it’s not fully reusable – the manufacturers say it’s got a realistic 5-20 reuses available, depending on a number of factors. We can confirm that this is trye. We used the included Frixion erasable pen and similar smart note syncing functionality (complete with the app designated smart sending that was easy for us to test).

It has 80 pages, each with a dot grid pattern, and a QR code which tells the app the page number. Like the Everlast, there is no sync, but rather a page scanning via camera feature. We discovered this to be moderately accurate but could be better.

We think the microwave feature is the most interesting part though. To clear the notebook, simply pop it into the microwave until the pages appear blank. This heat sensitive technology isn’t particularly groundbreaking nor special, however,we found it’s a very interesting use of it and we’d be interested to see where Rocketbook takes it in the future. This is a contender for the best electronic notebook for sure.

Boox Note Air 2 10.3 E-Ink Notepad Review

• Screen Size: 10.3”
• Battery Life: 4 Weeks (on standby)
• Reusable: Yes
• Pen Included: Yes
• Memory Size: 64GB

The Boox Note Air 2 10.3 is the thinnest E-ink tablet on the market; we measured it at just 5.8mm thick. We liked how the 10.3” screen gives ample room for any of our scribbles with an adjustable front light to tailor to aid comfortable viewing in any lighting. The screen also has a 227 dpi sensitivity for touch gesture control that we found to be hard to use at first.

We had some trouble having to go through different documents and make notes, but we found that we could load the documents and annotate them as we went. We loved the ability to add bookmarks and that the device could read 17 different file formats. For when those creative juices get flowing, we could express ourselves and start sketching and creating our next masterpiece.

The gesture control allowed us to switch between the interfaces and take screenshots with just a swipe. For any important meetings, we liked that we could enable the screen casting feature and share our notes and ideas with our colleagues. Overall, the Boox Note Air 2 is a great option that we recommend.

reMarkable Paper Tablet Review

• Screen Size:
• Battery Life:
• Reusable:
• Pen Included:
• Memory Size:

The reMarkable Paper Tablet is one of the most interesting and innovative takes on a digital tablet that we tested and stuck out to us for this very reason. While it’s got a very high price point compared to all the other devices we reviewed, nothing felt quite like the paper tablet to us when it came to a balance between functionality and niftiness.

The display is large and sunlight-friendly and uses CANVAS technology to produce a display somewhere between that of a Kindle and a piece of paper. We liked how it’s made for writing, reading and sketching, allowing us to import and export PDFs, eBooks, notes and doodles via WiFi capability. A contender for the best smart writing pad and best paper tablet.

It can convert our handwritten notes to typed text, sync over wifi, and without a backlight or a glass screen, it’s very easy to read and we could use it for long periods of time in various kinds of lighting and brightness. We could also share our notes via email, or annotate our PDFs by hand, saving them with our notes written on top. Of course, since we’re in the modern age, as soon as a note is saved to our Paper Tablet, it’s available via the cloud on all devices we have synced.

Why Trust Our Reviews

At Pixelsmith, we’re not about publishing clickbait. Here, we aim to write in-depth reviews about products that we have actually tested and used. The purpose of this is to provide you with useful information so that you can make an informed purchased decision when looking for the perfect digital notepad for your various needs.

At Pixelsmith, we’re more than just experts—each member of our team has a strong passion for technology and design. Everything from tablets, laptops, and notepads to accessories like wireless mouses and headphones—we have tried it all.

We also do not get paid to review products nor do companies gift us products to write a positive review. We have gone out and bought nearly all the notepads on this list. While we rarely receive products from companies, we do use affiliate links. This way, we earn a small commission on sales made through our site.

For this reason, we are able to guarantee unbiased reviews. When looking for the best digital notepad, we sifted through many products before finding the ones mentioned in this list. This way, we were able to truly identify the best notepads, notebooks, and writing pads on the market.

Have any questions about our review process? Be sure to contact us—we’re happy to assist our fellow tech, design, and gaming enthusiasts!

Best Digital Notebook Buyer’s Guide

After writing these reviews, we decided to put together a short guide on what to look out for when shopping for a digital notepad.

More than just an electronic notebook with a pen, you’re going to want something that not only works for you in terms of what you’re going to use it for, but it helps if the technology helps teach you to work in new ways that you might not have otherwise discovered.

Does it have Sync Capabilities?

Firstly, you’ll want to check if it has sync capabilities. If you’re a creative, artsy tech head like we are, you’re going to want a notepad that has a simple sync function, so you can either move your notes onto a device to edit and share, or store them on the cloud without fear of losing them.

What is the Digital Notepad Pen Like?

Secondly, and quite an overlooked factor, is the pen itself. It’s important that you look at the measurements and dimensions of the included pen to make sure it’s going to be something you can use comfortably without having to really adjust to the size and shape of it (especially when you’re using a pen in a new and innovative way).

A good way to do this is to go to an art shop, find the pen or pencil most comfortable for you and write down the measurements – other than this, you could just pick one of the tablets which allow you to use your own pencil.

Check the Dimensions of your Digital Tablet

Lastly, always remember to check the dimensions of your tablet. It’s easy to think it looks bigger, or smaller, than it really is. This could lead to issues, either with you being disappointed by how small your digital notepad is; or buying one that’s too cumbersome to be effectively portable.

Which Digital Notebook Tablet is for you?

You’ve now got a nice variety of options at various price points, all with different features and extras, to choose from.

If you’re still undecided, we’d recommend either the Wacom Bamboo Slate or Rocketbook Everlast. We felt these were the two best-made and most functional digital notebooks without too many frills that you’re paying an arm and a leg for.

Please do send us over some of your creations from these nifty little devices, we’d love to see what you came up with and how you found them to use!

As an Amazon Associate we earn commission from qualifying purchases. This helps us keep our dream alive to be able to write content on subjects we love and create opportunities to connect people through our social media platforms, helping them to network and build professional relationships. Thank you for your support!