Notes, handwriting and the bigger page

The broadest of the handwriting apps — notebooks, PDF import and export, a whiteboard, typed documents and audio pinned to the page it was recorded on. All of it is page-shaped, and a page on a folded phone is a thing you zoom around rather than write on.

Handwriting, document annotation and recorded audio in one place, which is the lecture-and-meeting case exactly. Audio tied to notes only pays off if you can see enough of the notes to find the moment you want, and that is a question about screen area.

The third of the established handwriting notebooks, and the one that behaves most like a stack of physical ones. Same dependency as the two above it: the writing surface is a page, and the device decides how much of that page you are looking at.

A free-form canvas rather than a sequence of pages, with sections and notebooks down the side and sync across everything Microsoft runs on. The side navigation is the part the fold helps: on a phone it is a drawer you open, and a drawer you open is a drawer you forget.

Already on the phone, already syncing, and quietly capable of checklists, scans, sketches and handwriting. It is on the list because the gain costs nothing: the folder list, the note list and the note are the layout it already uses on a tablet.

A knowledge base over a folder of plain Markdown files, which means the notes outlive the app. Its whole idea is connections between notes, and connections are the thing a single-pane phone layout hides — two panes is the difference between following a link and losing your place.

Structured documents with blocks, collections and sync across the Apple devices, aimed at documents you would be happy to send someone. Document-shaped notes benefit from being seen at document proportions, which is the same argument as the handwriting apps with the pen removed.

The workspace end of the category: databases, tasks and pages, used as often for a team as for a person. It is the entry that most resembles a desktop app squeezed down, and the squeezing is what the extra room undoes — tables in particular are unusable at phone width.

A shared board with no page edges at all, free to create in and collaborate on by Apple's own description. An infinite board is only as big as the window onto it; this is the entry whose usefulness is most directly a function of how many inches you are looking through.

Not a notes app but the one that finishes the job: read, annotate, fill and sign, then merge or split the result. Filling a form means seeing the field and the label at the same time, and on a folded phone that is exactly what you cannot do.