Take notes with Evernote for iPad

The Evernote software is useful on a computer for taking notes and organising ideas, but if you want a more portable version, it is also available for the iPad.

Installation is simple through the App Store and an icon will be created on the iPad home screen.

The text editor in the iPad Evernote app is quite basic but more than adequate for taking notes. We were disappointed that there is no word count feature as this is a very useful tool when writing articles on Evernote, something that seems to be very popular. Bulletted and numbered lists are possible so this makes Evernote a powerful tool for keeping task lists up to date.

One very useful tool is the audio recorder that saves the audio of a meeting with the note. This avoids the bulk of note taking at these times leaving you free to concentrate on taking part or just jotting quick notes as reminders.

We couldn't find a way to use text notes as a marker in the audio track, which would have been even more useful.

Notes can also be given tags, which is a very powerful way of keeping different notes organised. They can also be associated with a map reference and pictures added from the iPad. That's more limiting on the iPad 1 as it doesn't have a camera. This is a good way to add screenshots of webpages for reference.

The desktop version of Evernote can save entire web pages, which are synchronised with the iPad when they are both connected to the internet. Links are active in these captured webpages. Click on a link and a menu will appear offering to open it in an Evernote Windows. Once you start browsing the internet in this Evernote windows it is then possible to save more pages, known as clipping. There are also options for opening the link in Safari or sending it by email.

As Evernote is an online app there is no need to work in isolation. Notebooks can be shared with other Evernote users. This is a good way of sharing task lists or plans with other people.

The free Evernote account is limited so that it is only possible to access your notes online. Very important to anyone who uses their iPad abroad, Evernote has an option to only sync over a wifi connection so you won't get stung with high data costs so long as you remember to set this option.

The free account also has a more limited monthly data usage on Evernotes servers, currently 60MB. This is enough for a lot of text and webpages though audio will use this up faster. The settings tab shows how much data is left and how long before the counter is reset. There is also a guide to roughly how many notes, images and audio clips can be saved.

The Premium Evernote account costs US$5 a month or US$45 per year. This account increases the monthly storage allowance to 1GB from 60MB and lets you access notebooks when not connected to the internet. Past versions of notes can be accessed so it is possible to recover information deleted by mistake. A password can be added to the entire app to prevent unauthorised access.