CyberNirvana

Ever since the much hyped announcement of zero development in Google Notebook arose a while back, I decided to assess some good notetaking alternatives.

With so many similar products available in cyberspace, I decided to narrow it to 4 candidates. Furthermore, I came up with a policy to back the service with the most ambitious offerings without going over the top but maintaining a seamless and simple interface. The candidates were Zoho Notes, Ubernote, Web notes and Evernote. All of these offer the expected standard features : image/text/web clipping, mobile version, browser bookmarklet, rich interface and email to storage solution.

Although superb web tools in their own rights, Zoho Notes and Web notes were quickly discarded in the race. Evernote was the winner but closely followed by Ubernote.

The reasons Evernote won were:

1. A clear ambition from the company to integrate the tool in your daily life
2. A fabulous array of channels (mobile, browser, desktop) to access the tool.
3. The ability to take a snap on my Blackberry phone and send it to Evernote for filling
4. The ability to carry my notes 'offline' on my fully secured U3 USB drive
5. The dial to text features via a 3rd party service.
6. Find printed and handwritten text within images stored(yes, really!)

It's fair to mention that a couple of articles on Makeuseof.com (here and here) made me also a convert.

Of course, the Evernote guys are in for the money: they attract you with these features to tempt you in their premium offerings (bigger upload size, no ads, file attachments, better transcribing of photos into text) but hey, I am not complaining: if the value for money is right, I am prepared to throw my hard-earned cash into it.

Nonetheless I will keep Ubernote in my radar: it offers collaboration features that Evernote lacks. Not a deal breaker but something nice to have.

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