Evernote Windows Mobile Technical Preview Is More Than Impressive

The folks behind Microsoft’s super secret killer app, OneNote 2007 (which includes OneNote Mobile), better take notice. EverNote is hot on their heels and closing fast, at least by the looks of the public technical preview of EverNote for Windows Mobile. I got a whiff of this yesterday from good buddy James Kendrick and have been giving it a try on my Sprint (HTC) Mogul and I am more than impressed with what I see. Keep in mind this is a technical preview and not a finished product yet and they caution that it is an unsupported product at the moment. In fact they say this is more of a market test than it is anything else.

The home run that EverNote has hit here is excellent Inking ability on your mobile device that can then be synced (in a fashion) with EverNote on your Tablet PC. Though EverNote is a great Tablet PC application, I’ve never found it to my liking, but from the looks of this technical preview that I may be reevaluating that stance. You can take four different types of notes, text, Ink, photo (if your device has a camera), or sound recording. Again, I’m very impressed with the Inking and how well it transfers from the Mogul to my Tablet PC.

You need to have EverNote installed and registered on your Tablet PC and be running Windows Mobile 5.0 or 6.0 for this to work. There is a free trial of EverNote, so you can give this a go to find out if it suits your needs. You can either download a .cab file to your mobile device directly, or an .exe file to your Tablet PC that installs via ActiveSync. (I did the latter and had no issues.) And yes, there are separate versions for Pocket PCs (touchscreens) and Smartphones. Like OneNote Mobile, EverNote for Windows Mobile is not as full featured as its desktop parent. As an example, it does allow you to filter your notes via categories, though you can’t create new categories. The program is also not optimized for VGA screens.

For some I’m sure the one gotcha in the application’s development so far is that you can’t sync your EverNote databases via ActiveSync between devices. You have to manually copy your databases between devices using ActiveSync or you can always swap out whatever flavor SD card you might be using on your mobile device.  Once you make that copy or swap you can sync from there. Copying is certainly more tedious than I think most folks would like.

Again, this is a technical preview, and is covered with caveats and warnings, as it should be. But I’m impressed with what I see so far, and as I said at the beginning, the folks behind OneNote and OneNote Mobile better kick it up a notch. EverNote is about to make Inking on multiple mobile devices a reality from the looks of it, and Inking is the most oft requested feature in OneNote Mobile.