The explosion of mobile phones has made them a nearly constant companion for many people. It's only a natural an ever-present device would become a favorite note taking and ubiquitous capture tool. Today we look at five popular note taking tools.
Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite mobile note taking tools. We rounded up the nominations and now we're back to highlight the five most popular tools Lifehacker readers use to capture their ideas on the go.
Read over the descriptions below and then cast your vote for your favorite note taking tool in the poll at the bottom.
3banana is a capture tool from Snaptic with a strong emphasis on organization and tagging. You can save text, images, links, lists, and more, all while tagging them with hashtags for easy future searching. Accounts are free and offer unlimited storage for all the text and multimedia clippings you create. 3banana is available for both iOS mobile devices and for Android. The Android application has a few extra notable functions like attaching reminders to important notes and the ability to share your notes via Twitter, Facebook, or email.
Unlike many of the other contenders in this week's Hive Five, Simplenote is not a Swiss Army knife of functionality. You won't find voice-to-text or any fancy bells and whistles. Simplenote is a powerful and efficient web-based note taking tool with an emphasis on mobile integration through Android and iOS applications. If you don't want or need multimedia capture but you do want a very powerful and efficient tool for capturing and organizing notes Simplenote is a great choice. You can check out their web site for more information or for an in-house look at Simplenote's features check out The Holy Grail of Ubiquitous Plain Text Capture, our guide to Simplenote.
Evernote (Android/iOS/Desktop, Basic: Free/Premium: $5 per month)
Evernote is one of the first tools people think of when they think about digital ubiquitous capture. With Evernote you can easily photograph text, enter text in your phone, speak into your phone, and all of that information is made search friendly. Whether it's notes you pecked out on your phone's keyboard or notes you photographed off the legal pad you just scribbled them on, Evernote sucks it all up and turns it into a an index you can easily search, sort, and tag. A premium Evernote account increases the size of the multimedia files you upload, adds in collaboration tools, and increases the number of file types Evernote will accept and process.
Email/Text Messages (Variable Cost Based on Phone/Data Plan)
While fancy hashtags and indexed-text might attract some people to various capture tools others just want dead-simple and familiar note taking. Both email and text messaging garnered a fair number of votes in this week's Hive Five showing that sometimes the simplest tool is the best. Whether using their phone's email client or sending text messages to themselves many Lifehacker readers use a simple "send a note to my future self" style of note taking to capture their ideas. As long as you have a decent data and/or text messaging plan it's a free or nearly free solution.
Built-In Notes Tool (Free)
Most phones have a built-in not taking tool. For many readers this was as complicated as things needed to be. Open the note taking tool on the phone, take some notes, read (and possibly sync/copy them) at home later. Among the built-in note taking applications that received a nod the iPhone's note taking tool was one of the most popular. When all you really want is to replace your paper notepad with a digital one, the built-in notes tool is more than powerful enough.
Now that you've had a chance to look over the top five contenders in this week's Hive Five it's time to cast your vote in the poll below:
This week we have one honorable mention to share. Despite the power and flexibility of phone-based note taking tools, many people have never given up on pen and paper. While pen and paper might lack the fancy features of mobile tools, it never requires batteries, has sync errors, or input errors. Have a favorite note taking tool you want to highlight that didn't get a nod? Let's hear about it in the comments.
The explosion of mobile phones has made them a nearly constant companion for many people. It's only a natural an ever-present device would become a favorite note taking and ubiquitous capture tool. Today we look at five popular note taking tools.
While fancy hashtags and indexed-text might attract some people to various capture tools others just want dead-simple and familiar note taking. Both email and text messaging garnered a fair number of votes in this week's Hive Five showing that sometimes the simplest tool is the best. Whether using their phone's email client or sending text messages to themselves many Lifehacker readers use a simple "send a note to my future self" style of note taking to capture their ideas. As long as you have a decent data and/or text messaging plan it's a free or nearly free solution.
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