Support our independent tech coverage. Chrome Unboxed is written by real people, for real people—not search algorithms. Join Chrome Unboxed Plus for just $2 a month to get an ad-free experience, access to our private Discord, and more. Learn more about membership here.
START FREE TRIAL (MONTHLY)START FREE TRIAL (ANNUAL)
It looks like the Google Keep app has been updated with support for handwriting in the latest version.
Up until now, only the Android version has supported handwriting input and that’s only been for a few months. The implementation is decent, but even using a stylus on something like the Galaxy Note didn’t really feel like a native experience.
Oddly enough, using your digits actually feels more natural in the app.
The same seems to be true so far with Keep on Chrome as well. On the Acer R11’s touchscreen, input was pretty decent. Using a capacitive stylus still felt a bit laggy and the input wasn’t great.
I’ve seen a few examples of use on the Surface with its pen and the tracking was poor there as well.
Native Stylus Support
My hope is, with all the stylus-equipped Chromebooks coming, Google is going to at least work out additional input customizations on Chromebooks to make this experience a lot more smooth on devices with an active digitizer and stylus.
Writing is a difficult thing to mirror on a digital device, but with some tweaks it could be possible for Chrome OS to handle this very well.
To this point, Wacom is the single type of digitizer/stylus combo being used in upcoming Chromebooks, so it stands to reason that the developers could quickly implement some tweaks on the software side of things that make pen input in apps like Keep a much smoother and natural experience.
All this seems like movement in the right direction, so our hopes are high! I’d love to be able to scribble notes on the Samsung Chromebook Pro, for instance, right in Keep so I can see them across all platforms. With a stow-able stylus, this use-case seems like a no-brainer. Keep has long been my go-to note app, but I’ve always missed the ability to really take handwritten notes.
The best experience I’ve had with digital handwriting was a Galaxy Note, but the closed-source S-note was never great since I couldn’t easily see and edit my scribbles on anything but the phone.
With Keep getting pen input on the desktop, Chromebooks become crazy-productive in meetings and brainstorming sessions because the notes you take are immediately shareable and consumable by anyone on any platform.
That sounds like a handwriting experience I can get pretty geeked about!
