i can read books on it and it’s decent. but multitasking on a phone is terrible, i do basic googling around on a phone but i need a pc for any serious diving into anything. also anything that would need more than just typing out a few notes is slow and annoying on a phone.

it is possible once you get used to it depending on how you learn, if that’s what you have. i suggest you try around a lot of different apps for the things you will need. finding a good workflow helps more than people realize.

Might be of interest: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202407/5-ways-to-help-your-brain-learn-better

4. Location. Location. Location.

The hippocampus is the brain’s primary gateway to memory. Essentially, all new information must pass through this neural structure in order to be converted into consciously accessible long-term memory.

Lining the hippocampus are millions of tiny neurons called “place cells.” These cells continuously and subconsciously encode both the spatial layout of whatever objects we are interacting with and our physical relationship to those objects. For instance, if I were to place you in a maze, place cells would map out not only the global pattern of the maze but also your unique location within that pattern as you walked through the maze.

As a result, spatial layout is an integral aspect of all newly formed memories. This is the reason why, when it comes to reading comprehension and retention, hard copy always beats digital.

Print ensures that material is in an unchanging and everlasting three-dimensional location. You may have noticed that after reading from physical media, you can typically recall that a particular passage of interest is “about halfway through the book on the bottom, right-hand page.”

The unvarying location is embedded within our memory and can be used to help trigger relevant content in the future. Digital media have neither an unchanging nor an everlasting spatial organization. When reading a PDF document, words will begin at the bottom of the screen, move to the middle, then disappear out the top. When content has no fixed physical location, we lose a key component of memory and cannot draw upon spatial organization as a cue to recall content in the future.

Modern e-readers allow users to “flip” (rather than scroll) through the “pages.” Although a step in the right direction, this still omits the important third dimension of depth, which allows for the unambiguous triangulation of information.

If your primary purpose for reading is not memory (for instance, if you’re searching for key terms), then digital tools will often prove more effective than print. Furthermore, if you have a physical or mental impairment which necessitates the need of text interactivity, then digital tools may be essential.

However, if your aim is learning and if you have the luxury of selecting between different media, then print it out.

I do somewhat, but prefer my laptop. I think it would be helpful to be able to print or otherwise have a physical textbook, but my uni doesn’t have a printer for us to use and we all know physical texts are crazy expensive.

For my phone, I use the NaturalReader app. Its text to speech, but you can highlight and annotate the text as well. If you tap on a word, it’ll highlight the whole sentence so you don’t have to do the tedious drag-to-highlight thing. Not sure what it does with graphics, however. In that case I’d try out Zotero for mobile. Not sure how great the app is on the phone but I like it a lot in my laptop.

I use my smartphone for notes, and an eReader for text.

I would like one of those A4 size eink tablets with a stylus for this exact reason but they are unfortunately prohibitively expensive.

When I went back to college about 10 years ago, I did everything on an iPad. From note taking to studying. Everything was done digitally and synced to online backups.

I do things mostly digitally except for things like math and diagrams where it’s easier to draw it by hand.

If you’re stuck on your phone, you could use Anki for flash cards.

Studying medicine I imagine would be a nightmare on mobile. Better than pre-internet by far, but not ideal.

Back in college and grad school I used Adobe Acrobat to read all class materials and write notes/highlight texts. One of the benefits was that it was easy to search for key words. You could search your own notes/comments and you had the option to copy the highlighted text so it was searchable.

The pro version also has OCR features so you can do the same with scanned text. I wouldn’t pay for it now considering Adobe’a anti-consumer policies, but you can easily find a bootleg copy.

And if you enjoy reading print outs, you can print the pdfs along with all your comments and highlights.

Edit: Forgot to mention this was all on my laptop since typing and reading is a lot easier oh that than a smartphone