Android Note taking apps

As promised in the previous post, here’s a review of popular note taking apps for Android.

What’s the point of having a smart phone if you can’t jot down the priceless quote some one made, in the office meeting, for water cooler talk later, or perhaps a compilation of quotes for your blog.

With the number of choices available in the Android market, choosing the perfect note taking app for your Android phone has become a non trivial pursuit.

I have compiled a table of features for the popular notepad apps from the Android market, I have put the features that I thought would be useful.

I only tested the free apps, some of the following apps have paid versions which include more features.

Some applications have some other features worth mentioning that are not in the table. Here are some that I found note worthy

3Banana:

It has a good web interface. The web interface can , Barcode, Sign-in using Google account, Location tagging,

AK Notepad:

AK Notepad comes bundled as an uninstallable applications in some of the custom Android ROMs. It is a pretty decent option if all you want to do is take text notes.

ColorNote:

The main USP of this application is that the notes can be color coded and sorted based on the color. Other than that this is a simple app for taking text notes.

Evernote:

Evernote is perhaps the best known name in this list. They don’t have a release version out for Android yet, so I tested the beta version that can be downloaded from their site. Evernote  definitely has best online presence amongst the listed apps. Their desktop app is too good to ignore. If you are a Windows or a Mac user then this is definitely worth a very serious look. Me, I am waiting for them to release a Linux version.

Foxnote:

This application is supposed to sync with Google Docs but I was unable to get it to work.

GDocs:

GDocs integrates pretty well with Google docs. It allows the user to download their documents from Google Docs and edit them. The editing can be done offline. Documents can be created offline and can later be synced. If you use Google Docs then you should definitely give this application a try.

Note Everything:

This is a feature rich note taking application. Most of the features for which it says “no” in the table are available in the Pro version which has Photo notes, checklists, encryption, reminder etc. I did not try the Pro version.

Note Me:

Note Me has a slightly busy looking interface with lots icons at the bottom of the screen. It has filtering by tags and a send to calendar feature which is similar to the remainder feature that some otherapps have.

Notepad:

This is plain vanilla  note taking app, it provides syncing through its own servers at http://pad.helicoid.net

Paint Note:

This is not a normal note taking application. This is meant for taking picture notes. You can open any picture from your album or SD Card, add notes to it and share it using one of the many photo sharing sites. You can also create your own drawings and share them in the same way.

Ultra Notes:

This is another feature rich application. It is one of the few application that support encryption. The home screen, by default, contains a list of folders which can be used to categorise the notes.

Wiki notes:

This is useful for creating wikis, all wiki words (text with more than one capital letter) become links to notes of that title.

Status note:

This is another app which is not a simple note taking app. This puts an editable note in the status bar.

OI Notebook:

Open Intents (OI) have a pretty large suite of apps for Android platform. Their note taking app, OI Notebook, is a pretty decent application. The USP of OI Notebook is that it integrates well with other OI products like OI Voice Notes, OI Safe, providing additional functionality.