There are lots of apps that let you take notes on an iPad. The Noterize app was around for a while until it was purchased by Nuance in the Fall of 2011. Nuance subsequently changed the name to PaperPort Notes, made the app free, and incorporated its Dragon speech-to-text technology into the app. Today, PaperPort Notes a free app that you can use to take notes on an iPad using either a keyboard, your handwriting, or your voice.
PaperPort Notes lets you create Note Sets, each of which can contain multiple pages. You can create pages with various background such as a blank white page, a grid, or a page that looks like a white or yellow legal pad. If you are looking for an app that you can use to type notes during a meeting (I recommend using an external keyboard if you can), the app works reasonably well. There are some limitations versus a true word processor app, such as the inability to change the style of individual words, but if you are just looking for a clean interface to type and perhaps draw something using your finger or a stylus, this app works fine for that purpose.
Now that Nuance owns this app, it includes a voice-to-text feature that sets it apart from other note-taking apps. For the most part, it works quite well. I did encounter one small bug: you can usually say "cap" to tell software using the Nuance's Dragon engine (such as Siri or the Dragon Dictation app) that you want the next word to have a capital first letter, but when you say "cap" in this app, for some reason it fails to transcribe at all. Strange, but hopefully a bug that will be fixed soon.
I expect Apple to add Siri technology to the iPad at some point, so perhaps in the future all iPad note-taking apps will have voice-to-text capabilities. But for now, I don't know of any other note-taking app with this feature. This feature works best when you speak close to the iPad, so I don't think that you could use this app to transcribe on-the-fly when someone else is speaking such as in a meeting or in class. (Plus, you can only talk for about 30-40 seconds before the app needs to pause and translate that to text.). Having said that, the app does give you the ability to record audio for each page, so you could record a lecture while you take notes if you just want to listen to it later.
You can also draw on the screen, but I don't recommend using PaperPort Notes to take extensive handwritten notes because it lacks the zoom feature used by apps like Note Taker HD and Notes Plus that allows you to write larger text that is shrunk down on the page. As a result, you cannot get as many words on the page, and the quality of your handwriting decreases substantially.
In addition to a pen, the app has a highlighter feature. And you can do more than just annotate your own notes; you can import a PDF document, including documents in cloud services like Dropbox. The app also lets you add a text box that looks like a sticky note, and you can adjust the rotation of that note.
Pages of notes that you create with PaperPort Notes can be exported as PDF files and sent to an e-mail, sent to another app on your iPad, or saved to a cloud service such as Dropbox.
I don't think that this is an app that I will use very often. For typing notes, I'm more likely to use either an app that lets me adjust styles (such as Pages), or one of the many pure-text apps if I just want to get words on a page. For handwritten notes, I've explained above why I far prefer apps like Note Taker HD and Notes Plus with a zoom box. The voice-to-text feature is neat, but it's not something that I will use very often when taking notes. I do sometimes dictate an e-mail on the iPad, and the free Dragon Dictation app on the iPad does that quite well, but I don't think that I have a big need to dictate longer notes on my iPad.
Having said that, this is still a nice app, and perhaps it will fit more into your practice than it does for me — especially if dictating notes could be useful to you. The app is free, so try it out and see what you think.
Click here to get PaperPort Notes (free): 
