Evernote App Review: Check out Evernote on the iPhone/iPod Touch

Evernote App Review: Check out Evernote on the iPhone/iPod Touch
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The Evernote App for iPhone

The Evernote App is one of the best iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps out there. Why? Well aside from any particular features, this app lies on the foundation of Evernote’s already fantastic service. If you haven’t tried out Evernote before, check out this article on How To Use Evernote. Once you try it you’ll never go back.

The rest of this article assumes you already HAVE an Evernote account (free or premium) and can use the app right away.

The Main Menu

From the front page of the app you can directly choose to

  • start a new text note.
  • take a snapshot with your camera.
  • choose a picture you’ve already taken to start a note.
  • record a voice message.

Also, along the bottom you’ll see buttons for a new note, a listing of current notes, a place for favorites, and a link to the sync menu.

The design of this menu is great because it’s so easy to quickly begin recording info without wading through lots of options.

The Notes Menu

Notes Menu

After clicking “Notes” at the bottom of the main menu, you’ll be taken to a pane for viewing all of your previous notes. From here you can flick up or down OR use fast scrolling along the right side of the screen.

Click on any single note and you’ll be shown the title and full text/images of your note. There isn’t an enormous amount of formatting available in Evernote in general, so the mobile version is pretty similar to what you would normally see on the web or desktop clients. If you want all the extra tagging and such associated with your note, simply click “Details” for a screen listing the notebook, last date updated, creation date, and any tags or URLs.

To edit your note you’ll need to click the pencil icon in the bottom right-hand corner. This will bring up an editor screen where you can change most of the fields. Sometimes a complex note will have certain values (like images) that cannot be changed on the mobile app, but you always have the opportunity to append text to the end of the note.

Lastly, if you would like to attach a note to an email or delete a note, those buttons are available at the bottom of the note page.

Back on the main notes menu, keep in mind that Evernote’s powerful search is fully available on the app. Simply click the search box to begin a simple search or select “Advanced Search” for options to narrow by notebook, tags, geolocation, and date. If you’d like to look through your notes purely by geolocation, click the icon in the upper-left corner to see a map view with flags for each note.

Image Capture

Taking pictures with the Evernote app is simple enough. Just click “Snapshot” on the main menu and a capture aperture will open up. Snap your photo and Evernote will automatically add the image to a new note. As mentioned before, you cannot really move the image around, but you’ll be able to format it later in the desktop application.

If you already took a picture and want to save it to Evernote, just click “Camera Roll” on the main menu instead.

Voice Memos

Voice Memo 2

A neat bonus feature on the Evernote iPhone app (though I must admit I never really use it) is the voice memo mode. You can hit “Voice Memo” on the Main Menu and bring up a recording application. The app counts down the seconds and then begins recording your voice through the phone’s microphone.

Once you finish recording your message, just click save or delete.

Synchronization and Settings

Sync

The app rounds out with a significant number of settings. Click the “Sync” tab to open up the settings.

The first thing you will see is an option to “Sync Now,” which is handy when you aren’t sure whether your notes have been saved or not. On the notes menu, you can actually swipe down to initialize a sync, but before that feature was added, this was the only manual syncing method.

Below that you will see account options and settings specific to your personal information.

Monthly Usage

There is also a handy read-out of monthly usage, similar to what you can see in the desktop application.

That’s the App…What Do You Think?

Overall, the Evernote app is super useful for quick reference or jotting down short notes. Longer notes (like class notes) would probably be a hassle. A lot of people like the iPhone keyboard, but even its most fervent supporters would struggle to record an entire lecture or meeting’s worth of note-taking on the app.

I think that the camera option is by far the most useful feature. Take pictures of wine bottles (and add comments), your license plate, posters, or prospective purchases for later research. If you have the iPhone 4, the snapped images are usually high enough in quality for the Evernote OCR to transcribe words into text.

Let us know what you think of the app in the comments!

This post is part of the series: Articles Introducing Evernote

With these short articles, you can learn all you want to know about Evernote, the desktop client, and the iPhone app for mobile. Check it out!

  1. How To Use Evernote: A Short Getting-Started Guide
  2. Get Evernote on Your iPhone! A Look at the Evernote App