Samsung Notes review: a pen-first notebook that works best inside Samsung's world

Built for people who write by hand

Some people think best with a pen in hand. Students marking up lecture slides, people who sign and annotate PDFs, anyone who sketches a diagram mid-meeting. Samsung Notes is Samsung's notebook app for that kind of person, and it mixes handwriting, typed text, photos and voice recordings in one document.

It is free to install, and Play puts it at over 1,000,000,000 installs. That makes sense for an app that most Samsung phone and tablet owners will already have. The real question is whether it deserves to be where you keep your notes, rather than just sitting there.

Day one: making a note and bringing the old ones

Starting is simple. You make a new note from the main screen, and it is saved as an sdocx file. That is Samsung's own format. Remember it, because it comes up again below.

If you are moving from an older Samsung phone, the app will import content from S Note and the old Memo app. There are two routes. Smart Switch, Samsung's phone-transfer tool, carries the data from the other device, or you can pull earlier notes back in through your Samsung account. Either works for someone upgrading within the brand. For someone who has never had a Samsung account, the second route is just one more sign-in to set up.

What you would use every day

The core is the pen. You get a set of writing tools: ballpoint-style pens, a fountain pen, pencils and highlighters, each with its own colour and thickness. It is aimed at people who care how their handwriting looks on the page, not people who want a quick scribble. The eraser lets you pick out what to remove rather than wiping the whole page.

Notes are not just ink, though. You can take a photo straight into a note or pull in an existing one, then tag and edit it. That suits whiteboard snaps, receipts and pages from a textbook. Samsung also mentions adding scanned documents through the camera, which helps when the paper version is the one that matters.

Voice recording sits in the same note. Record a lecture or a meeting while you write, and the audio and your notes end up in one place instead of two apps. For a student this may be the most practical thing in the app.

PDF annotation is the other daily job. Samsung pitches the S Pen as the tool for marking up PDFs, so you can write on a document someone sent you instead of printing it.

The occasional jobs: locking, sharing, other devices

Any note can be locked. You choose a locking method and password in settings, then lock individual notes from inside them. It is per note, not all or nothing. Your shopping list stays open and the bank details do not.

Collaboration is on offer too. Samsung says you can work on notes with other people, and the app sends invitations to shared notes. It also warns about sync problems, so notes are expected to move between your devices rather than stay on one phone.

Samsung pitches it as working across phone, tablet and PC, with links to PDF, Word and PowerPoint documents. Read that as fitting alongside those formats. It does not replace Office. You would still open a Word file in a word processor to do proper editing.

Who should look elsewhere

If you mostly type short lists and reminders, this is more app than you need. It is built around ink, media and documents. A plain quick-capture notes app will get you from idea to saved note with less fuss.

If you switch between phone brands, or keep your life in a Google account, the sdocx format and the Samsung account ties work against you. Notes kept in a format one company controls are harder to take with you later. People in that position may be better off with something tied to the account they already use, such as Google Keep. They could also pick a notes app that saves in open, standard formats.

And if you never use a stylus, a good part of what sets this app apart, the pen tools and PDF markup, matters less to you. The photo and voice features still help. But the reason to pick this app over a simpler one is mostly the pen.

The verdict

For a Samsung owner who writes by hand, this is an easy recommendation. It is free. A single note holds ink, photos, scans and audio. You can lock notes one at a time, share them, and annotate PDFs. Those cover the jobs a student or a meeting-heavy worker actually does.

The catches are about where your notes end up. They live in Samsung's format, the smoothest path for older notes goes through a Samsung account or Smart Switch, and the pen features favour people with a stylus. None of that makes the app bad. It makes it a Samsung app, best used by people who plan to stay with Samsung.

3.9 out of 5. Solid and free, held back by how firmly it ties your notes to one company.