Tool for mobile on the go highlighting and note taking

Hello all,
I’m kinda new in all this PKM / zettelkasten / 2nd brain stuff and I’m just building my workflows of getting the ideas in Obsidian. I’m hoping to get a bit of advice from more experienced users because I was searching around and could not find an answer.

I just stumbled upon one problem. I often use public transport to get around the city and killing time with reading. From time to time I find an interesting idea I want to keep and preferably take a small note in my own words.

For a simple ‘read later and on the go’ I’m using Pocket on my Android phone. Which can do a highlight, but without a note to the highlight.

Do you have a tip for an app, or workflow you are using that can do:

  • read later library with the browser extension to saving the articles
  • synchronization to a mobile (android) app
  • highlighting and note-taking
  • export to Obsidian
  • preferably free of charge

Thank you all in advance!

I’m still using Dynalist as an inbox for mobile. I then copy it over once a day. Dynalist have wonderful mobile apps that are more developed than Obsidian’s.

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Check out Readwise. It takes your highlights from wherever and will put them right into Obsidian.

I used Instapaper and each article has an option to export highlights and notes as markdown that I would paste into Obsidian. Manual but not too onerous.

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This sounds like Readwise’s Reader app when it’s released.

Readwise Reader | The first read-it-later app built for power readers.

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I use Google Keep. I have a label on Keep for things I want to read, another for notes I want to eventually export to Obsidian, and another for note I need to put in my vault ASAP. I love the Obsidian mobile app but I don’t have time on the go to open my entire vault just to take a quick note.

Thank you guys for the sugestions!

After a short period of trying those out, I came to conclusion. It seems to me that ReadWise and Instapaper(not suggested here) are almost exact fit to my requirements but with some small fees (3$/m for instapaper, 5-8$/m for readwise).

With Dynalist I’m able to keep using Pocket as the ‘read later’ app and share interesting pieces of text to Dynalist inbox with a handwritten note very easily. This applies to web and mobile reading, which I really like.

Then, highlighted (maybe it is better to call them clipped) pieces of text are waiting to be copied over to obsidian from time to time. In future, I’ll try to figure out some way to automate this export. But manual copy is fine for now :slight_smile: .

Thank you guys very much!

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