I’m a big fan of Evernote, and I’ve been using it for a long time, on Windows Mobile, then Android, and have bemoaned the lack of an app for Windows Phone. Microsoft has included One Note in office mobile, and yes it syncs to your SkyDrive account, and syncs with it, but it does not offer the other features that Evernote offers, the ability to create notes via Twitter, and email. It offers a Desktop client as well, you can literally now access your notes from any current device, or browser with the web clipper. So a version 1 release for Windows Phone was always going to grab my attention. It was released yesterday, and has already been updated today, Besides a few minor bugs the app is a great success, and probably the best first implementation of Evernote I’ve seen on any platform.
Evernote for Windows Phone is free, and before we go any further I want to address what is the major bug for the application. Many users have reported downloading and trying to deploy the application, and receiving a white screen of death. The initial note sync takes a lot of data, more than your Windows Phone will allow to be downloaded for any app at one time. To avoid this, run Evernote for the first time, either connected to a wifi point, or connected to an internet connected PC. Get that one little glitch out of the way to start with and the app runs perfectly.
What’s notable is that the UI is consistent with other mobile clients that you may have used in the past, and when you dig a bit deeper, you can see the Metro influences in the settings menu.
The UI is incredibly fluid, and easy to navigate, for adding notes on the go, it’s also fairly quick. I like to think about it like an internet post it note, there’s no formatting, you can add a voice note or a picture, and edit notes on the go. In fact you could write a whole novel on one note, with illustrations, if you like.
Once you have done the initial large sync, it is easy to refresh/resync anything that hasn’t been changed, and adding new notes is not a problem. The thing I like the most about Evernote on Windows Phone is the ability to add notes with multiple forms of data, text, images and sound files, to a single note and download the elements individually.
The premium version of Evernote has a few more features, offline support is the most important, if not online the changes you make to notes with the free version will not be saved. If you are using the application on your windows phone you will generally have data access and that will not be a hindrance.
In general, for a first release for Windows Phone, it has not frozen or crashed the phone once, it has the ease of use, and is familiar, the developers have not strayed away from the original apps, making this a comfortable transition. If you have ever been sold on Evernote before, and have moved to WP, this is an application you want to look at. It has instantly become one of my must have applications for Windows Phone
Hello there,
any idea how evernote works with Windows Mobile 6.5?
I tried to login on evernote from my HTC Touch 2, but still receive a time-out error, even when connected to wifi.
Hey Mathieu, you first need to have an account which you set up from a PC. I used Evernote extensively with my HD2 and never had any troubles logging in, if you say it times out, check your password, make sure you have input it correctly. The only time you should have trouble logging in is if you have a very weak network signal 🙂