Ok, I’ve had the Supernote Manta for a few months now, so how do I like it? Short answer: I don’t think I’ve written on paper since a day or so after I bought it.
Why I bought it
I bought the Manta primarily for work notes. I write a lot of notes in my job, and while in past roles I didn’t have to refer to them very often, in my latest role I find that I am. Except I can only carry maybe 6 month’s of history around with me and I found myself wanting to look at stuff from years ago. I also wanted a search function, and the ability to organize notes better. Visions of exporting my handwritten notes as text also danced in my head, but I wondered how well that would work with my handwriting. I write in cursive, and not very clearly.
I also thought that maybe the Manta would replace paper journals. While I like pens and paper, I’ve accumulated over 40 notebooks of journaling, and I start to worry about what I’m leaving my kids to worry about. Also, I do look back through them from time to time, and more than ever I look up old entries so search would be nice to have. Really, the same feature set I was looking at for work notebooks.
The big question was how I would feel about it. For work, I didn’t think moving to a digital system would be an issue. I don’t retain anything when I type, but writing by hand I do so I wasn’t going to move to typing notes. For journaling I was wondering if the lack of a physical object would bother me. Notebooks become mementos, and with the Manta that would go away in some ways. Would that bother me?
Is it doing what I thought it would?
So after making the switch away from paper here’s my observations:
For work it does very well. I had no plans to integrate it with One Note, or anything else, so no feedback on that. The built in features for headings and keywords work pretty well. The search seems spotty at best, but I haven’t had a lot of occasion to use it. I suspect keywords are where it’s at if you want to find stuff later based on the limited testing I’ve done.
Handwriting recognition is driving me to improve my handwriting for legibility, with minor progress so far. I suspect it is still faster to just retype the notes than to use the export, but that’s more a function of my handwriting and how I take notes than the features in the unit.
The surprise was that for personal journaling I’ve been using it and haven’t looked back. While I think it’s virtual certainty that at some point I’ll miss having worn tattered notebooks that represent a trip or time in my life, it hasn’t happened yet. I’ll admit that sometimes the writing on the Manta seems cold and sterile and impermanent.
The system is clearly focused on simplicity and most of the time that is welcome. However long term I expect note organization to be a bit of trick. Here’s what I mean:
You can put notes in folders, but the filename always defaults to a date-time combination. You can edit the name, but it’s a cumbersome step on a device that is inherently slow on the keyboard, and handwriting recognition is not reliable enough.
So naming notes is really important. It would be nice to have the option to have filenames inherit the folder name as well as the date time string, so they can be moved (or processed downstream, something very likely) later without losing any clue about their contents.
For journaling, instead of just having a folder named ‘Journal’ and creating a new note for every day, I create a note each month with ‘Journal’ in the name, i.e. Journal-2026-02 for February. Long experience with computers tells me that later many of these files will end up exported as PDFs or organized a different way, or imported to some other system and a name like 20260213-143245 will not be very useful, even if it is unique. But it won’t be unique, because I have audio recorders that use the same scheme. These days I find the default filename convention to be the biggest make-or-break feature for a device.
There is no tagging or other tricks either. The design was focused on mimicking a paper notebook use case with not much depth for managing the wealth of content it will accumulate.
But what more than makes up for those weaknesses is the ability to insert pages in notes when needed, separate subjects into separate notes, and effectively keep a library of notebooks handy. This has been very useful for things like packing lists where I now keep them in a separate note for easier reference – so when I go back to, say, Brazil, I can look up what I took last time and make better choices.
Security is an outsized subject on the e-ink forums, but I’m far, far more concerned with losing notes to my own errors or glitches than end-to-end encryption. It has password protection for files and the device in general. The passcode to use the device is just like on a phone, which is fine and a sensible precaution. The file-level passcode is not very workable. There’s no concept of session, or keeping access for any length of time, so every time you enter the file you have to enter the code. The device is not made for fast entry, and I have to re-enter the code 2 out of 3 times I enter it. It would be better to have passcodes that enabled access for as long as the device was unlocked, and leave it at that. Having it disable locks when on particular wifi networks would also be really nice.
Switching between notes is more difficult than it should be. You can put notes or specific pages in a quick list, but it only allows 8 entries and adding more silently pushes the bottom ones off the list. There is a recent notes button that gets a sorted list of notes which is nice. There is a ‘last opened note’ button just takes you to the note you’re in – sure, technically correct, but probably not what the user was seeking. It’s designed to be used when you’re coming from a document or other app. It would be better if the system could recognize that you’re in a note, and thus probably want the one prior to that.
While I have a lot of suggestions for improvement in the end it does what I thought it would. The Supernote Manta has been an easy switch because it is much easier to keep it all in there than on paper.
A few other things:
- There is a project for Mac owners on GitHub called supernote-ocr-enhancer that should solve a lot of the search and handwriting recognition problems. I intend to pursue that.
- Yes, color could be nice. Not nice enough to go with another brand though.
- The Supernote pens are a waste of money in my opinion, I use the King Write from amazon.
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