Out of a dozens of application which resides on my system (read PC), Evernote is one I use the most for making notes, collection of interesting content, for research, and managing interesting links for future reference. Evernote is a cross-platform desktop/SAAS based note-taking tool with desktop application, it lets you store just about any kind of note – Type a text note. Clip a web page. Snap a photo. Grab a screenshot. Everything you capture using Evernote is automatically processed, indexed, and made searchable. If you like, you can add tags or organize notes into different notebooks.

Evernote’s desktop app interface is divided into three columns and easy to navigate. You are shown your monthly note storage limit at the top with other menu options, including deleting and emailing a note.

On the left you have one-click access to your notebooks, tags and saved searches. To its left or the centre column shows all your notes with the most recent one on top. Clicking on any note will open the note in the right-most column of the Evernote desktop app, allowing you to examine or edit it. A search box at the top lets you search through your notebooks in Evernote.

Evernote’s offers a host of  Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer add-ons to clip a webpage and save it as a note within seconds. You can even take photos from your webcam and save them directly as notes on to Evernote. Equipped with Evernote’s elephant-sized memory and it’s ridiculously easy ways of note-taking on your PC, forgetting anything important gets ever more difficult.

 

There’s Evernote Trunk for instance, which lets you access almost 100 add-ons you can use from within Evernote.

Mobile Apps, Interface
As useful Evernote might be on the PC, never does it shine more than on a mobile, handheld device. Unless you’re using a very old Smartphone, Evernote has an app for your mobile platform: iOS — iPad,iPhone, iPod touch; Android, Blackberry, Palm, Windows Mobile. The Evernote app blends into the device very well. You can straightaway start uploading images, scribbled notes, and voice messages on to Evernote in no time. Images you take from your Android or other Smartphone can be geo-tagged and saved on to Evernote.

OCR

There is one interesting feature of Evernote which makes it even more interesting – Evernote’s servers are OCR-enabled, meaning they can look at images you’ve saved and decipher words in them (if there are any) and make them search-able. This works fantastically well in one instance. Normally at business meets and press events, where a lot of business cards are exchanged, Evernote comes to the rescue: I just click the photo of a business card, save it online. After I go home, I can ‘read’ and ‘search’ through them by entering a search term and Evernote will highlight the word on the business card’s saved photo.

Shortcomings
There aren’t many, Evernote promises to take notes and it does that remarkably well. However, the only shortcoming I saw was the inability to edit rich text notes on Evernote’s mobile app — you can’t edit notes over the Web on a free account, anyways.

Free vs.. Premium Evernote Account
Evernote is a free note-taking application, but it also offers a premium account for $5-per-month or $45-per-year. Although a free account will suffice for users starting out with Evernote — it gives you 60MB of upload per month, text recognition inside images, cross-platform support, etc. — a premium account comes with a few perks like quicker OCR priority, any file synchronization, and up to 1GB of upload per month. So if you’re someone uploading a lot of photos and audio files, Evernote’s premium account has its benefits.

Summing-Up

For a note-taking application, Evernote is one of the best in the game. If you have a Smartphone and find traditional note-taking a hassle, give Evernote a try — you have nothing to lose, it’s free. What’s more, it has some very interesting features that makes Evernote a must-have app on your handheld mobile device.

Why you should download and try Evernote

· It’s lightweight, fast and very easy to use

· You can store data locally and/or synch it to a folder in the cloud

· It automatically saves notes – there’s no need to look for the ‘save’ button

· You store notes inside Notebooks so you can create a Notebook for each project you’re working on

· Notes can be tagged much like a blog post

· Evernote creates excellent screen grabs

· It’s great for single or collaborative use

· The basic version is free

· You can email notes from within the application

· You, or any member of your team, can access your account from any device that has Evernote installed on it

 

Happy reading

MV