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Once you’ve written a page or two of notes, it’s time to digitise them. You can just about make these out as you write, helping to keep your handwriting straight, but it’s not as convenient as a conventionally lined page. Instead, there’s a faint grid of dots on the page, which helps with the scanning process. One thing that does irritate me slightly is the paper isn’t lined. You have to take a little care, but not much. Even as a left-hander, used to smudging ink across the page as I write, this is no better or worse than writing with a ballpoint pen on an ordinary pad. It feels just like ordinary paper and the ink dries almost instantly. Writing in the books is literally writing with pen and paper. I suspected the paper might have a plasticky texture to repel the ink, but that’s not the case. There are many different colours and highlighters in the range, too.
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A pack of five rollerball pens costs £8.99 on Amazon. One blue ballpoint pen is provided with the notebook, but supplies aren’t difficult to find nor outrageously expensive. For the disappearing ink trick to work you need to use pens from the Pilot Frixion range. The first thing to note about writing in your Rocketbook Wave notebook is that you can’t do it with your common or garden Biro – at least, not if you want to wipe the notebook clean later. Is this the note-taking solution we’ve been waiting for? Let’s find out. What’s more, you can wipe those 80 handwritten pages clean by sticking the book in the microwave for a couple of minutes, giving you a fresh notebook to fill. You scan its pages with your smartphone and swiftly beam the results to email, Dropbox, OneNote or pretty much any application you can think of. So what is it doing on here, a tech website, you might wonder? Well, the Rocketbook Wave is like Brian Cox – it’s smarter than it looks. The Rocketbook Wave, on the other hand, is just like writing on paper, because that’s exactly what it is. You’ve every right to hunt down the journalist and poke him/her in the eye. If you’ve ever read a review of the Apple Pencil and have been told “it’s just like writing on paper”, it’s not.
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