Technology Blog

Harnessing my inner-nerd, the second I got a smartphone, my first thought was “How will this change the way I take notes?!” Let me give you a little history first. I’m a chronic note taker, list maker, and documenter of various important (and mundane) ideas and reminders. Before I had a smartphone, I always carried a pen and tiny pocket-sized moleskin. A lot of times I would just use it for phone numbers, grocery lists, or directions. Occasionally I would find myself struck with a rare moment of brilliance in which I actually use it to document a good idea.

After a while though, I would get a little tired of carrying around a pen and notebook and my phone (that didn’t serve as a note-taking device at the time) and my keys and a wallet and whatever else I felt I needed to have with me even though I probably didn’t. Once I started gearing towards a smartphone, I started to realize the vastly convenient potential of having an excellent, multifaceted note-taking device all on one phone, that you take with you everywhere.

Which Note-Taking App to Get?

This is a very good question to ask yourself as you begin transforming your smartphone into a fully fledged notebook. There are a number of great apps you can try out, many of them for free. For the Android, I’ve found Note Everything to be a great utilitarian note-taking app; it gives you the ability to document your usual text and voice notes and even “paint” notes as well, meaning that you can jot things really quickly with the touchscreen if you just want a rough sketch or don’t want to deal with the hassle of a touchscreen keyboard. Note Everything has a Pro version (available for $4.50) which allows you to take photo notes, set reminders and alarms, create checklists, and stick notes in the status bar. Note Everything Pro is a great all-around note-taking tool that can pretty much fit anyone’s needs.

Another great note-taking app is the trusty Evernote, which works on any smartphone. Evernote allows you to record text notes, pictures, voice notes, and upload files. Essentially what makes Evernote different from Note Everything is that it stores all notes in the Evernote cloud website while Note Everything stores locally on the phone. This makes the Evernote app move a bit more slowly than Note Everything (because you have to wait to upload every note), but this also gives you plenty of storage space and allows you to easily access your notes on any computer. So it really depends on how you want to access your notes once you’ve taken them. I recommend at least trying both, if not all the other countless note-taking apps out there, but I’m also a huge note-taking nerd.

How These Apps Can Help Bloggers

A lot of the ideas you get for blogging (or that I get anyway) don’t happen when you’re at your computer ready to type a post. Sure, you can usually remember them once you’re in front of your keyboard, but this is not always the case. In fact, there are many ideas that you’ve probably forgotten, and you simply don’t even realize that you’ve forgotten them.

Let’s say I’m walking down the street, and I see an advertisement for a new tech gadget that I didn’t even realize was coming. I take out my smartphone, snap a picture, and store it in Evernote with the tags “tech” and “blogpost.” Then once I sit down at my computer to write for a technology blog, that idea is there, organized, and waiting for me to use it.