Roundup of note taking software for Android

Now that school’s back, I’ve been looking for a good Android note taking app. I thought my criteria is fairly common and obvious, but so far I haven’t been a 100% satisfied with what I’ve found on the market (ha!). The criteria is as follows:

• Stable: this one’s pretty obvious, as I’d hate to lose lecture notes for no good reason
• Combines text input and drawings: maybe the Touchpad screen sucks, but hand writing notes with a stylus on it is painful and slow. I’d prefer to type out notes and switch over to a stylus for diagrams and formulas when necessary.
• Export. To sensible formats: PNG or a JPEG is an odd and useless choice, as no one wants to OCR what they just typed out on the soft keyboard, but you’d be surprised how many apps only offer those two.

Software I’ve found so far, in the order of matching the criteria:

1. Evernote + Skitch. So far best match. Evernote lets you jump into Skitch to draw a quick diagram, and is rather good for taking notes. It has text formatting, ordered and unordered lists, to-do items, tagging etc. The app has so far been quite stable, and has a gorgeous UI. All the notes sync to the cloud, and the app itself saves everything as regular HTML, so once you get to a desktop with a standalone or web-based Evernote client, it’s trivial to export notes into any format you want, print them, or even edit the HTML and CSS to reformat the notes into something nicer looking. The downside of the app duo is that images from Skitch are not added to the body of a note, and are instead added as image “attachments” at the top, so you’re stuck with whatever order you’ve initially created your drawings in. It’s therefore necessary to label all the drawings, which isn’t the end of the world given how nice everything else is; I’d pay $5 if this was a paid app, but it’s free! 
2. Handrite. Great app! Very convenient, snappy handwritten and diagram modes. Brushes are very customizable, but a bit tedious to switch. For some bizarre reason,  spell-checking and auto-capitalization are off during keyboard input, which means you have to be that much more attentive when you type notes out. I’ve left a comment about this in the app review on the Market, I’m sure it’s a bug that’ll get fixed. There is also no exporting to PDF, but the author is promising it’ll happen.
3. Freenote. Lots of very useful functionality, wrapped in the some of the ugliest GUI you’ll lay your eyes and hands on. Feature-wise, this app has everything I want, minus exporting. Handwriting and drawing modes are quite good and fast. The UI does take patience to get used to as it feels a bit like a 90s VisualBasic school project. 
4. TabNotes. I’ve tried the trial version, which is supposedly no different from the paid version. The UI is a bit hard to guess at sometimes; there is no keyboard input mode, nor any good exporting options; the handwritten mode is very noticeably laggy (at least on the Touchpad). Unless you have a fast tablet and plan to handwrite all your notes, I wouldn’t recommend this.
5. MaplePaint. Reminds me of Xournal, with all the associated problems of directly porting a desktop app to a touch device: toolbar icons are small to the point of being unclickable; there is no zoom-in mode for handwriting entry, only a global page zoom in/out; text entry is floating OneNote-style and isn’t reflown with the handwritten text, nor are there automatic line breaks. To add to those pains, clicking the colour selection button presents one with a colour wheel. I do wonder if some app makers realize that too much choice is bad: I can guarantee you I’ll never pick the same colour twice ever, which will certainly hurt consistency of notes, e.g. if I want all the headings in the same shade of blue. There’s also no exporting options I’ve found whatsoever (?), which makes MaplePaint a rather puzzling app. Good thing it’s free.
6. Genial Writing. Does one thing and does it well: the app has the smoothest handwritten note input I’ve seen, but sadly, no soft keyboard or even diagram input modes are present. I’m not sure who would want to only ever enter handwritten text in the age of teenage blind typing and texting, without being able to sketch a diagram, but if you’re one of these people this one should be at #1 for you.
7. MobileNoter. A Microsoft OneNote client for Android. Doesn’t let you create new OneNote notes, so only really useful if you already use OneNote. I don’t, so I didn’t give this more than 5 minutes.
8. Catch. Very pretty and minimalistic UI, but text notes are completely separate from drawings and can’t be mixed together. Next…
9. Springpad. Same problems as Catch.
10. ColorNote. Todo notes with no drawing ability. Included for completeness sake because the Market search kept bringing it up in the search results for anything note related.

And there you have it. I’ll keep an eye out for new offerings and will update the post accordingly.

1 month ago  /  3 notes  /  Comments