EverNote Technical Preview for Windows Mobile rocks!

Cimg0334You read that correctly, EverNote slipped a technical preview of a Windows Mobile application in a couple of weeks ago and reader Gordon Cahill sent me an email and said I really needed to check it out.  That’s what I’ve now done and Gordon is right, the Windows Mobile version of EverNote is an awesome program that blows that other mobile note-taking solution OneNote out of the water.  It’s hard to figure out where to start explaining why it’s so good so I’ll just start at the beginning.

First of all you need to have the desktop version of EverNote 2.2 installed before trying to install the WM version.  There is a 60 day free trial of EverNote 2.2 so that’s not hard, although you can never see how much this program will eventually cost you until you install it and then click the purchase link in the help file.  It’s $49.95 which is not a bad price for such a full-featured note-taking application but EverNote should be up front about that.

Once you have EverNote installed on the desktop you can register and download the Windows Mobile preview.  There is both an EXE version for installing through the Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) and an OTA version (CAB) that can be downloaded and installed directly to the WM device.  Once it’s installed you fire it up and it needs to create a database on an external storage card so you can sync it to the desktop version.  This is where the experience really shines as you don’t even need to go through that ridiculous WMDC for syncing the database which is very good indeed.

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What makes this preview version so cool is that you can create four different kinds of notes on the WM device, text notes, ink notes, photos from the camera notes, and audio notes.  Tablet guy that I am I am very impressed with how good the ink notes are and the notes shot on the camera are great too.  The program provides a nice interface although it’s not optimized for VGA screens yet.  There is a good selection of filters so that you can handle a large volume of notes on the small screen, just like on the desktop version.  You can filter so that the following notes are displayed separately from the others:

  • Web Clips
  • Outlook Clips
  • Excel Clips
  • Word Clips
  • Digital Ink
  • Flagged
  • To-Do
  • Done
  • Images
  • Personal
  • Other

These are all the default categories from the desktop version so it’s clear that EverNote wanted you to be able to work with your large desktop database on the PDA.  This is done by storing the database on the external storage card, in my case the Mini-SD card.  I popped it into a card reader and plugged it into the desktop and in EverNote there I set up the initial synchronization.  This took just a few seconds and when I popped the Mini-SD card into the Advantage the entire note database was there and ready to go.  This sync method means you have complete control over the process and can run it whenever you want.  It’s simple yet effective and is a great way to go to avoid WMDC problems.  Ink notes look great and I even clipped a web note on the desktop that displays perfectly on the WM device, including hyperlinks which work fine.

The technical preview is free as it should be so if you use EverNote or are looking for a solid note-taking solution on both a desktop and a WM device you need to check this out.  Note that the WM is a technical preview so it’s not without risk but so far I’ve had no problems with it.

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