Is there a reason you went for Whynote over the others?
(I have a Wipebook - but sometimes I forget to erase it immediately, and it gets hard to erase if you leave it too long. Also, the pages aren't the most durable, especially to any liquid. The Whynote doesn't appear available in larger sizes though - e.g. A4, Letter).
It's super simple: it's the first one I heard of. I already had a Nu board day-planner/organizer/thingamajig I bought during a trip to Japan. I though it was only a novelty thing but I found myself using it more and more; not as a erasable calendar thigy but as a notebook.
Then a friend showed her own Whynote, and I ordered mine shortly thereafter. Plus, this comes from a swiss startup so it felt good to do something chauvinistic for once. Finally, it's available in brick and mortar stores in my area, so it's easy to impulse-buy.
But comparing the two products page I found out that the last version of the Wipebook ommits their detachable spine. That would be a dealbreaker for my, since I really like how I can reorganize the page as I want. It's also much easier to scan if you have can fan a scanner that can batch-scan a pile of document (typically in a library).
Because this really looks too good to be true, at least for me. Maybe I should order and see myself...
[1] : https://youtu.be/y_PWw7G1jfg?t=51s
* While we're at it, the pens tends to die much quicker than a conventional ballpoint pen (2-3 month of solid use ? I don't really know). But then, I think I write more with this notebook than I ever wrote with a conventional pen, so my estimation is probably flawed.
* I think I had dirty fingers only once because of the pens, but then that tend to also happens with gel pens. Maybe there's something wrong with the way I'm transporting or holding them ?
* When you erase a whole page (probably with some water - the ink is water soluble - and a microfiber tower) and it is not properly and thoroughly dried, it can stick to the opposite page. But that sort of thing tends to happens to a lot of plastic sheets, and the leave are thick enough to not be a problem. It's only a minor papercut (... sorry, this pun was terrible).
* The spine is not supper-dupper rugged and I recently lost one spiral (one year after I bought it). But the perks of having reorganisable and easily scannable pages are worth it.
* I would really like dotted pages instead of lined pages but this is not available at the moment.
* OneNote OCR doesn't transcribe the scanned page as magically as what it can do with a tablet PC stylus (it's probably looking at the stroke themselve, something that is lost when you scan a page)
So the pens that Whynote sells are just branded Staedtler 305, is that right? Not having to ship the pens from abroad and being able to buy them locally would sell the product for me.
Exactly.
Look and feel : The texture and feel is quite different from paper. It's basically paper laminated with some sort of plastic. It depends on the pen you're using[1]. If you're using a medium pen, it feels a lot like a whiteboard (gliding feeling) . With a fine pen, it's a little bit more scratchy.
[1] they are all using Staedtler Lumacolor correctable 305 pens. I wonder if there's an expired patent or if it's just a happy coincidence
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-hE6VDAG_I
Having an erasable pen solves my problem of making tons of stupid spelling mistakes, being guilty of wasting paper and losing them in a giant pile of worthless annotation. For me it's more helpful to have some of my working ideas physically in front of me instead of hidden behind another window or virtual desktop.
My particular brand of erasable notebook (Whynote) also have detachable sheets, so I'm not bound to the linearity of a conventional notebook (I not super fan of constantly having to turn pages).
[1] http://www.whynote.ch or http://www.wipebook.com or http://www.magicwhiteboard.co.uk/category/magic-notebook