I'm still struggling with the idea of using either an iPad or an Android tablet as a serious writing tool. One big reason: both struggle with styled text. I can see the argument about why you might not need to write italic or bold or formatted text for a lot of portable note-taking. But if you want to share text between your desktop and your tablet... well you do.

<a href="http://davidhewson.com/2011/02/syncing-scrivener-to-windows/">Scrivener's very promising sync feature</a>, for example, becomes a lot less interesting if you can only deal with plain text, which is the norm on the iPad and most word processing tools I've found for Android too.

There are signs this is changing. Evernote, the notes system that runs across Macs, Windows, iPad and Android, has a new Android update. Before this came along Evernote would look at a formatted note in Android and offer to turn it into a copy in plain text before you could edit it. Yuk.

Now you can open and edit formatted entries directly. You still can't create them and you couldn't use this to edit a Scrivener sync unfortunately. But we are getting there.

I bought an iPad to edit and revise manuscripts primarily, and it still doesn't do that very well if I'm honest.

<!--more-->Have to say though looking at the overpriced Version 3.0 Android tablets being launched in Barcelona at the moment I'm not too optimistic about them either. They seem like Christmas stocking overstuffed with toys that will pall after a couple of days. Who needs a 3D camera over the ability to edit text properly? Someone I guess... but not me.

Here's Evernote's text editing in action.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUxPIxYrZqs[/youtube]