PRODUCT OVERVIEW
Price: Under $20
Brand: Moleskine
Categories: Apps, Other Peripherals/Accessories
👍 Pros: Premium build quality of a hardcover notebook, great integration with Evernote mobile and desktop software, includes 3-month subscription to Evernote Premium.
👎 Cons: Only as good as Evernote’s handwriting detection, search by text spotty
✅ Bottom Line:
Evernote is my personal favorite note-taking app. It lives on my phone, laptop, and iPod Touch keeping all my electronic scribbles and thoughts in one place catalogued to be picked up later. The only complaint is that touch screen keyboards aren’t necessarily the fastest way to jot down a quick bit of information and my Moleskine isn’t exactly a digital device. Enter the Moleskine Smart Notebook.
The Smart Notebook is a Moleskine notebook through and through. It sports an elegant textured hardcover with an elastic “lock” and bookmark. It keeps to its roots as an sturdy and attractive place to jot down your thoughts, but what sets the Smart Notebook apart is the specially designed pages and included stickers that allow you to write, draw, scribble and then transfer over to Evernote using your iOS or Android device’s camera.
To get a digital copy of your page is quite simple, open up the Evernote app on your device and open a new note. Select camera and then select the option for document reader (it looks like a page atop the screen). The first thing that you’ll notice is that the available viewing area has changed and that the camera’s white balance has been optimized for the page. Click to capture and wait a few seconds for the app to process the image. Once saved you can add tags to your note for easy cataloging.
One draw back from the entire system however is that you only get an image of your handwritten notes and not a digitized copy. In the end you’re left with an image of the page that you cannot edit
The biggest incentive to start using your Moleskine with your Evernote app is probably the 3-month Premium subscription that comes with your notebook. Currently the monthly subscription to Evernote will set you back $5 per month and a classic hardcover notebook will set you back about $13; so if you have considered an upgrade but weren’t really sure you can take this as an opportunity to try it (ultimately it works out to about a free month of Premium).
Check out our gallery below and follow this link to pick one up for yourself.
I like this, and it almost could be a good idea, but I’ve been doing this with standard notebooks and evernote and it works just as well.
That’s part of the reason I couldn’t give it a higher rating. It works well even with evernote’s limitations on handwriting recognition. That said, getting a month of free Evernote Premium is not a bad deal.
Yeah. I’m thinking about it, since I use moleskines and the like fairly regularly.