Lock feature
The lock feature on mine works fine maybe it was a bad switch?
What a mess! two boogie boards in a row don’t work. The lock feature does not save notes.
I cannot recommend these boogie boards. So far I have a larger size one and no matter what I do the lock feature does not save what I write on the board even if I try the different steps like removing battery, etc. nothing has worked. I thought it was just a glitch and the company I bought it from sent me a second one and it’s doing the same thing. I wish there was a feature that had it like a magnet on the back so I could hang it. I can sit there and write notes on it, but it erases the minute I press the erase screen is supposed to save it. It’s not working on either board as far as the reason I bought it. The reason I bought it was to save notes to the boogie board app, and I can’t even figure out how to do that because nothing’s working. The fact that it’s not simple out of the box clear instructions no instructions came with this thing is ridiculous for the amount of money I paid for it. I will be sending both of them back. I do not recommend this. Go on Temu and buy just a plain simple one.
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Addition Bugs Require Fixing
I have enjoyed working with this app for many years. With version 3.4.0, the app no longer supports the smart pen as it shows in the Photos for this app. I wrote to the company letting them know about this issue several weeks back. It remains a problem as I write this review
Removed Carbon Copy Settings
This is no longer a helpful app. All it allows is taking photos of notes, which other apps can do and do better. Unless it brings back the carbon copy Bluetooth pen settings, this is more a wasted investment and useless product as it’s a worse version of other apps.
Broken App
Latest update removed “Smart Pen Settings” making the app essentially pointless as you cannot connect your smart pen to actually upload notes. I have received no guidance on this issue from the company.
Not a very good product.
Writing is very light barely usable. App just takes picture and picks up lots of black spots not in the writing. Very limited and it was $80AU but is really just a toy.
Not as it states
Very poor support. I tried to register and it would not accept any Australian phone no. I entered. So there fore I could not register or can I get any support. Either there is an error in the web form or they don’t want anyone to ask for support. I cannot find any way to reset the eraser as if you follow the instructions you can only get lighter and lighter until it’s invisible. I find the eraser is useless. Better not to use it. When I googled online it said it could be synced to the app. But this too is not right, you need to take a photo of the boogie board and that will place it in notes. If I could get my money back, I would.
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Horrible
It makes me write it down then take a picture on the app. Why would I spend $45.00 on the board when I can just grab a sheet of paper and scan it with my phone. Don’t buy this app or board, it’s a complete waste of money.
Average
It’s 2025. This app should have a lot more features. For example there’s no writing to text feature. All your handwritten notes are not searchable for instance. Also, it would be great if you could connect different folders to different services. I don’t want my school notes going to my work email, but I do want meeting notes to do so. In short, the boogie board itself is nice but this companion app is pretty much synonymous with taking pictures of notes you’ve written on a paper pad. No real advantage here except for the fact you can save multiple pages of boogie board notes to the same file. Would love for this app to be more fleshed out.
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Great app!
Great for saving notes! Sustainable option for replacing paper and pen.
Could Be Improved
I have the blackboard in note size without the carbon-copy, and I do certainly find this app useful for saving notes and finding them later. I mainly use this app on a phone, but I found that it works on iPad as well. While you can certainly use the app to save your notes, I have found a bunch of possable improvements to make the app better.
(Note: This review is a long one)
1. Image share size.
There needs to be an option to export your blackboard drawing as a photo in the original resolution in the image share size settings. Taking a photo of the blackboard using the default camera app on an iPhone SE 2nd generation would produce a 12 megapixel photo. Using the app to take a picture of the board and saving it as a large image scales down your save to only 6 megapixels. Yes, I get that cropping out the frame of the blackboard will reduce the amount of megapixels in the image, but yet, there should still be an option to export your save as the original photo that isn’t limited to the writing surface.
2. Manual adjustment of taken date
Speaking of importing images, there needs to be an option to change the date in which your image was taken from the info editor. For example, if I took a photo with a different device and I wish to import it into the blackboard app, I need to change the system time on my iPhone so that the timestamp on the imported image can match the timestamp on the original photo. All that is needed is an option to open up a date and time picker by tapping the “Date” field to manually adjust it so that your saves can appear in the correct order. Another option is to detect the date taken for any imported photos and automatically set that as the date for the produced scan. Some restrictions that can be placed on an iPhone prevent changing the system time (like if there is app time limits set), so an option to manually change the date taken would resolve the issue for those who cannot change the system time on their device.
3. Search function is broken
Onto the topic of finding your notes, it seems that the search function is broken in the current version of the app (2.1.1). Tapping the documents tab in the top menu bar just shows “No Item Found” even if you have saved scans (is this just limited to the carbon-copy models?). What’s more is that searching for text also dosen’t bring up any results, even when specifying flags (by the way, more than four flag colors would be useful), despite the text I am looking for being in the title and/or notes of a document. The search function should be able to find the queried text in the name and notes field of any document. There should aslo be an option to sort your documents alphabetically, by file size, or by flags in the all documents folder. What would be even cooler, but not required, is an option to search for text in an an image using OCR. But despite this, not having the search function working defeats the purpose of having it.
4. Cloud export/sync
If I plan to use the blackboard app across devices, I have to figure out a workaround to make sure that the documents taken in my iPad match the ones taken on my iPhone. Even though I haven’t tested if your documents sync when using two devices with the same Apple ID, there still should be an option to sync your documents somehow. Maybe you could optionally sign in with an account to store your saves there and have them on all devices with the same account. Or maybe you could link your saves with a third-party platform like Google Drive. (I guess that could could automatically updated new documents to Google Drive, but there isn’t a way to automatically import them into other device) Speaking of cloud exports, there should be an option to import from a cloud save, not just only export. How else are you supposed to make a backup of your documents?
5. Integration with other iOS features
This suggestion may be limited to only IOS, but there should still be more integration so that you can be more productive when using the app. Multiple menus throughout iOS can be used with the Blackboard app once you have it installed. I have 6 different possibilities for this
A. In the system menu for sharing a photo, there could be an option that says “Import to Blackboard”. Doing this would take the photo provided and create a new document with it, allowing the user to set the name and notes before being saved to the app.
B. Another integration could be using widgets with iOS 14/iPadOS 15. A widget can be placed on your Home Screen with quick actions to search your notes, scan a new note, or receive a carbon-copied document. Although one size of widget would be suitable, additional sizes that might be limited to one option would also be awesome.
C. Having the app be able to work in landscape mode and support split view, slide over, and drag and drop (with photos to import) on iPadOS would make it more flexible in creating documents.
D. Having the app be able to integrate with Siri or the Shortcuts app with actions to create a document (by passing an image to the action and then providing the name/description/flags/folder using other variables), find your documents (by filtering with similar functionalities to those in the search function built into the app) and export your documents (by outputting the selected document as an image that can be used in other actions).
I’ve seen apps do all of the four things above so it is certainly possable, and although it might take some work for the developers to be able to add these features, they would make the blackboard app more useful.
So that’s it. My long and detailed review describing things that could be done to improve this app that I have found while using it. Thank you for reading all of this. If you think that any of these suggestions should be added, leave this review as helpful so more people can see It. Developers, if you have any comments or feedback, please respond to my review. Thanks so much.
(Note: This review is a long one)
1. Image share size.
There needs to be an option to export your blackboard drawing as a photo in the original resolution in the image share size settings. Taking a photo of the blackboard using the default camera app on an iPhone SE 2nd generation would produce a 12 megapixel photo. Using the app to take a picture of the board and saving it as a large image scales down your save to only 6 megapixels. Yes, I get that cropping out the frame of the blackboard will reduce the amount of megapixels in the image, but yet, there should still be an option to export your save as the original photo that isn’t limited to the writing surface.
2. Manual adjustment of taken date
Speaking of importing images, there needs to be an option to change the date in which your image was taken from the info editor. For example, if I took a photo with a different device and I wish to import it into the blackboard app, I need to change the system time on my iPhone so that the timestamp on the imported image can match the timestamp on the original photo. All that is needed is an option to open up a date and time picker by tapping the “Date” field to manually adjust it so that your saves can appear in the correct order. Another option is to detect the date taken for any imported photos and automatically set that as the date for the produced scan. Some restrictions that can be placed on an iPhone prevent changing the system time (like if there is app time limits set), so an option to manually change the date taken would resolve the issue for those who cannot change the system time on their device.
3. Search function is broken
Onto the topic of finding your notes, it seems that the search function is broken in the current version of the app (2.1.1). Tapping the documents tab in the top menu bar just shows “No Item Found” even if you have saved scans (is this just limited to the carbon-copy models?). What’s more is that searching for text also dosen’t bring up any results, even when specifying flags (by the way, more than four flag colors would be useful), despite the text I am looking for being in the title and/or notes of a document. The search function should be able to find the queried text in the name and notes field of any document. There should aslo be an option to sort your documents alphabetically, by file size, or by flags in the all documents folder. What would be even cooler, but not required, is an option to search for text in an an image using OCR. But despite this, not having the search function working defeats the purpose of having it.
4. Cloud export/sync
If I plan to use the blackboard app across devices, I have to figure out a workaround to make sure that the documents taken in my iPad match the ones taken on my iPhone. Even though I haven’t tested if your documents sync when using two devices with the same Apple ID, there still should be an option to sync your documents somehow. Maybe you could optionally sign in with an account to store your saves there and have them on all devices with the same account. Or maybe you could link your saves with a third-party platform like Google Drive. (I guess that could could automatically updated new documents to Google Drive, but there isn’t a way to automatically import them into other device) Speaking of cloud exports, there should be an option to import from a cloud save, not just only export. How else are you supposed to make a backup of your documents?
5. Integration with other iOS features
This suggestion may be limited to only IOS, but there should still be more integration so that you can be more productive when using the app. Multiple menus throughout iOS can be used with the Blackboard app once you have it installed. I have 6 different possibilities for this
A. In the system menu for sharing a photo, there could be an option that says “Import to Blackboard”. Doing this would take the photo provided and create a new document with it, allowing the user to set the name and notes before being saved to the app.
B. Another integration could be using widgets with iOS 14/iPadOS 15. A widget can be placed on your Home Screen with quick actions to search your notes, scan a new note, or receive a carbon-copied document. Although one size of widget would be suitable, additional sizes that might be limited to one option would also be awesome.
C. Having the app be able to work in landscape mode and support split view, slide over, and drag and drop (with photos to import) on iPadOS would make it more flexible in creating documents.
D. Having the app be able to integrate with Siri or the Shortcuts app with actions to create a document (by passing an image to the action and then providing the name/description/flags/folder using other variables), find your documents (by filtering with similar functionalities to those in the search function built into the app) and export your documents (by outputting the selected document as an image that can be used in other actions).
I’ve seen apps do all of the four things above so it is certainly possable, and although it might take some work for the developers to be able to add these features, they would make the blackboard app more useful.
So that’s it. My long and detailed review describing things that could be done to improve this app that I have found while using it. Thank you for reading all of this. If you think that any of these suggestions should be added, leave this review as helpful so more people can see It. Developers, if you have any comments or feedback, please respond to my review. Thanks so much.
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Update = Awesome
I did review in the past but wanted to commend the addition of automatic uploads.
You might add some documentation somewhere though. I struggled to understand the settings and what was happening for a while on the OneNote upload. Haven’t tried others.
Thanks for adding that! I am very devoted to using my CC Pen and Blackboards for all meeting notes!
You might add some documentation somewhere though. I struggled to understand the settings and what was happening for a while on the OneNote upload. Haven’t tried others.
Thanks for adding that! I am very devoted to using my CC Pen and Blackboards for all meeting notes!
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Waste of time
The worst product I’ve used for a long time
Not carbon copy compatible
I was so excited to purchase this but as the pen isn’t blue tooth, it isn’t supported by carbon copy to edit scanned images.
Love the board, but could be so much better!
Love the board, but could be so much better!
Very happy camper
I just got my letter size Blackboard, downloaded the app and got started. After reading reviews, I didn’t have high expectations, but was immediately pleasantly surprised. It only took a few minutes to set up folders and add my notes to the correct folder. It was also easy to delete notes. This works for me.
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Better than Rocketbook
Blackboard by Boogie Board is so much better than Rocketbook because you don’t have to worry about erasing the Boogie Board with a wet cloth and having to use the wet cloth over and over again. I like Blackboard by Boogie Board because it’s a lot cheaper and a lot better than Rocketbook. I would strongly recommend Blackboard by Boogie Board to anyone who wants to go digital. 👍👍
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Pointless
You don’t actually need this app. You can get the same result by taking a photo of your board and editing it how you like in the native Photos app.
Buggy on my phone
App seems to lock up every time I go to save a file.
Save function not working properly
I have scanned three items so far and each time I press save function, the twirling circle that indicates it’s doing something just keeps going. I had to restart my phone each time to see the saved item. This is very frustrating and makes it unusable to me unless this is fixed.
Hello
No good if it is only viewable on the device it is captured on. A phone is portable but its screen is really small to look at pdf size files.
Need an option to be able to back up captures to cloud drives automatically (onedrive, google drive, etc.).
Thank you.
Need an option to be able to back up captures to cloud drives automatically (onedrive, google drive, etc.).
Thank you.
