Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe for pocketnow.com and this is a viewer request episode you see we've had actually a couple viewers say hey you've talked about Evernote in the past now Evernote looks like that is an app that lets you take notes and sync them with the cloud so in this episode we'd like to show you a little bit about what Evernote is what it does and get into how I use it and how it might help you in your life let's go take a look all right so normally this is the part where I would start showing you the application in use but before I do that I've got to explain to some of you guys who don't know what Evernote is well whatever note is so if you already know what Evernote is in order to use it then go ahead and skip this part and jump right over to the app no problem I won't be offended go ahead and do that for the rest of you guys Evernote is a web app it's also got desktop and mobile clients kind of like Gmail but for notes now Gmail is free but it's ad based Evernote has kind of a different platform it's got a different philosophy of how to do it and they call it freemium I know it sounds weird it's their word and not mine but what they do is they have a free version or a free level of service and then a premium version or a premium level of service and the apps are really all the same the level of service is what differentiates it and it's really how much data that you sync to the web that determines whether you're on the free of the premium plan so it's really kind of nice if you want to try it out go ahead and try it it's not going to cost you any money until you decide to pay for it so they're not going to automatically start charging your credit card don't let you know how you've exceeded your free allocation and it's going to start costing you money so here it gives your credit card money if you want to do that or scale back to use they'll let you know they're really good I haven't hit that cap yet I don't use it a lot but I do use it you know quite a bit so a little bit more detail it's a web app so you have to be able to sync to the cloud to be able to get the full use out of this now early versions of the app you also had to have an internet connection so that you could basically use it because everything was downloaded from the web and upload it to the web it was all right there on the web not on your device the new version which a couple of you son that's why I'm doing this video that version has a local store that will basically queue up anything that it needs to send to the web and it won't worry about not being able to synchronize your notes from the web if you're offline if you're unavailable to get out if you're only on $7 data and you don't want to use you know any of your megabytes or whatnot for a furling Evernote so this version they've thought it out really really well and it is the Android version I can't speak to any other versions honestly I don't know they have an app for iPhone they have an app for Windows Mobile I don't think they have one for Windows Phone 7 yet if they do make sure you let us know that in the comments down below so we can get one of our windows 7 guys when it's bone7 guys working on it now on the desktop side they do have apps desktop apps for both Windows and for the iOS or for the Mac OS whatever their Apple computers just kidding guys don't flame me okay basically what you can do is if you're on your desktop you can take a note you write you know you save it and it's there you can then have access to that on your mobile phone or on a browser on you know a friend's computer or whatever and it synchronizes all this on the web and it's just beautiful everything works the way it's supposed to you can take web snippets so that you can remember web page it's kind of like a bookmark but in your own Evernote book you see that if that forever note little play on words they did there anyway yeah I don't know funny to that you decide but what it'll do then is it'll keep all this for you all together forever and ever so that you can have access to it whenever you want whatever you need and they really want you to to get addicted to this so if you want to have that the playground drug-dealer metaphor you know that's great the first one is free and once you get hooked then it's going to cost you that's their model like it or not that's what it is so there's your background there's your history on what Evernote is and what Evernote does one last thing before we get into hands-on Evernote is not just text notes it's spoken notes it's pictures it's web snippets it's it's actually handwritten notes it's all kinds of stuff and it's really cool it also does you know handwriting recognition on their servers it does text recognition if you want to take a picture of this card it'll recognize that text on their servers and then allow you to search for that on your mobile device it'll actually let you search for what the content is in the picture of that business card or that picture of that advertisement in the magazine or that hand scribbled note that you wrote down it's going to do all of that text recognition in the background turn it into text that you can actually search on so really really kind of cool Microsoft's trying to do something like that with their OneNote application it's quite a bit different and there's not a one-note Android app so uh you know I don't know why I'm even mentioning it but that's the intro all you guys who fast forwarded through it can now get back to the practical hands-on so let's all go take a look at that okay so after that long intro we're going to keep this hands-on practical relatively short all right first and foremost you've got different types of things that you can do you can add a new note or you can add a new snapshot there's a little divider line right here separating it out from all notes all of your tags your notebooks and the ability to search can also go into your menu and synchronize with your online notebook now it's going to do that automatically in the background if you tell it to in the settings which is over here here's where you can upgrade to premium if you want gives you more notebooks increased quota more fun stuff like that you can also select what notebooks you want to synchronize and keep offline right now I have none and it says in order to do that I've got to have a premium subscription to it so I'm not buying the app the app itself is free it's the service that I'd be paying for upload notifications Here I am going to be notified up here in my status bar of basically the upload status so I'm going to write a note it's going to be local to the device and it will let me know up in the status bar when that's been synchronized to the cloud so kind of nice there I can clear history clear cache send a log of information to Evernote in case something went wrong it's got my current version I can check for updates here's where I can save on my my data use if I don't have an unlimited data plan I can choose to sync over Wi-Fi only I can choose to sync my data when the device powers up I think that's a good idea so we'll do that it's gonna sync automatically every you know every day is good so I'm going to uncheck the powerup thing use GPS so it's going to geotag my notes which is nice I can look for all of my notes when I was at mix in Las Vegas or when I was at and MWC because it's all geo tagged and then if I want to use my network which could have monetary cost I can choose that or unchoose that so there's settings of course I can log out if I want to using the Sign Out button as well back here down at the bottom I've got my last sink it says it last sink ten minutes ago so fabulous great good job tags tags are just like you'd expect them to be they are key words that you can use to identify your notes so here you can see I've got some stuff tagged Android I got some stuff tagged bus a salt ALK those the copilot live people activation stuff android cemetery just a whole bunch of stuff I can come through here and do all kinds of cool things I can sort it by note by title by whatever and you can see I've got little little counters little indicators to let me know how many notes have that here's my hit and run notes which was actually one of my very first Android articles for pocketnow.com so make sure you go back in the history and and check that article out I can also look up my notebooks so I've got notebooks for church for contacts geeky stuff Michael that's my son lifetime unfiled of course and that's where I got most of my stuff I didn't do better with filing in notebooks my wife's phone yada yada yada basic stuff there and you could have notebooks now I'm just associated notebooks with generalities because the free version doesn't let you do an awful lot of of notebooks so it's very very limited in that aspect but you can repurpose that too to have different areas or different aspects of your life instead of very granular notebooks about specific stuff like at pocket now I could have a notebook all about the t-mobile g2 I could have a look all about the the HTC Desire HD and have all my stuff my photos my articles videos any notes that I had any websites and I wonder for - all in that notebook and what goes in notebooks well notes do and here's a list of all my notes which I mean that's pretty obvious instead of showing you that lets go into new note now in this new note you can give it a title so we're gonna do this and I showed you the the voice features before new note and didn't hear me new new note okay it's not like in Texas or voice today so we're just gonna call it what do you guys want to call it pocket now and o/w okay great and now we could write some content and my title just moved up off the screen automatically for me now I can either do an attachment I can attach something to it a picture audio video or just a regular file I can come over here and add some tags skip that I can tell it what notebook I want it to go into and I can take a picture with the camera which takes a minute so there's my hand if we wanted to take a picture with my hand you like that kinda creepy isn't it we'll cancel that and then of course we've got the microphone using the microphone you can actually have a recorded a voice recorded note and on this ROM I'm having a little bit of problem with with microphone stuff with spoken stuff as you could tell and with the camera that's not an Evernote thing that's a wrong thing custom ROM it's a bug so just don't be worried about that but now you can see I've got this little player icon so I can actually tap that and either remove it do it or go back just just a nice audio note and it's included right there I can even have a text note to go along with that so all kinds of really cool stuff I'm relatively impressed with this app and I think that if you do not have a note-taking app that you use regularly this is it the one thing that it doesn't have that I would really like it to is to have a to-do list basically a daily task list where I could have on this view maybe a to-do or goals or whatever so that I can check stuff off when they're completed I can assign deadlines and whatnot to it that's not really the intent of Evernote but when I'm thinking about to-do lists and notes that kind of go hand in hand I don't know what are your thoughts then again what what apps are out there that do the to do stuff like I've just mentioned that you use what other notes taking apps are out there that you use instead of Evernote of course I want to know that go ahead and leave us comments down in the bottom especially if you can give us videos of your favorite note-taking app in action that would be amazingly awesome and all of our viewers would love to see that so we've come to the end of it it's a very basic program with lots of cool stuff that you can do with it I highly recommend it like I said the app is free in the Android Market the service is free up to a point with certain more cool and more powerful features available at a very very affordable price so don't be shy away from the premium end of things I like quite a bit if you like this kind of video and want to see more reviews and hands-on of specific apps let us know down in the comments below and give this video a thumbs up so we know you like this kind of stuff just in general subscribe to our video channel if you haven't done so already so you can make sure that all that stuff that you know everyone else is commenting about that they want to see yeah that you don't miss out on that and of course head over to pocketnow.com to read more of our Android and other smartphone related articles for pocket now I'm Joe Levi