1. I have a 7" Archos 70it tablet that is barely used now because I enjoy my Note that much.
2. You can use it as reader nicely. You can even hold the s-pen button, long touch any screen with it to initiate screen capture, and annotate the captured image with the s-pen afterward. You can not use it on the source documents though, CMIIW.
3. ICS is coming in this quarter with several premium apps in tow for free

 

You can read stuff great on the Note.

Wouldn't recommend trying to seriously use it to make lecture notes on though. Far too small a screen and the s-pen is occasionally a bit flaky. Good for shopping lists, great for image editing with apps like PicsArt, TouchRetouch, etc. I did a birthday card cutting and clipping photos for my wife that would have taken just ages on a laptop, the s-pen is brilliant for stuff like that. But not for doing tons of writing.

Maybe the premium upgrade will add quite a bit though - so my opinion might change.

 

Agreed.
Do yourself a favor and invest in a tablet if school is your main concern.

 

Books and PDF files are usually locked so without a special application to create overlays within the documents this is not possible. What the note does in it own native app is make an image copy of the page or whatever you write on. About the only way to put notes into books is to use the Nook application and Quickoffice Pro will allow you to place notations in PDF.

 

I know you don't want 2 devices, but IMO, if it works well enough, I think the Note 10.1 coming out in the near future would be brilliant for notetaking.

 

Samsung apps provide iAnnotate Lite - a free pdf annotator.

 

I'm a student as well and also thought about what you're thinking as I bring a netbook to school with me. Thought of hooking up a flexible keyboard to the Note to make things lighter on the go and to show off what the note can do (never tried it but saw online that it can be done). But I must say that I didn't push through with it as there are just many things that make it a bit difficult to do on a small device. For word processing its fine but if you want to do spreadsheets you normally want more real estate, plus you can't do all the good stuff on presentations. But its still doable if you want to sync and convert to office files if you want to. I just don't like double handling, if my mind goes off typing and finishing ideas then that's homework's done even while in class (well maybe a little fine tuning before printing). But yeah would still do try and do it if I wasn't finishing up in 3 months.

 

Does it work well? Can I highlight sentences with different colors, drop notes on it and save it as a separate file? Don't want to mess with the original pdf.

 

I sold my Galaxy tab 10.1 as it became redundant when I upgraded from S2 to Note. Now its got ICS its the dogs danglies

 

Im on vodafone. Mine comes on tues, have they upgraded it to ics already then?

 

yup, no holding Samsung back, chomping at the bit their upgrade dept.. Like hungry dogs they are.