Our plan for Evernote on mobile devices

March 2nd, 2008

Our goal is to make Evernote your effortless, external brain. This means that you can capture and access your notes on any computer or mobile device. On relatively full-featured computers you’ll have a choice between a native client (for Windows and Mac) and a full-featured web client that’ll work with any major browser. As you know the Windows and Web clients are now in early beta and the Mac client is coming soon. What about the other half of that story?

Functionality on mobile devices will fall into three broad categories:

Type 1 – No Client

You can use Evernote from your mobile device without installing any custom software in three different ways. These are all available now and we’ll be enhancing them actively over the next few months based on testing with many different types of phones and PDAs.

Mobile Web Browser:
Just point your built-in browser to http://www.evernote.com/m/ and you can browse and search through your notes as well as enter new notes. You can adjust the settings to control thumbnails and the number of notes displayed per "page" to best fit your particular device. You can also execute "saved searches" from the mobile web client, so you can set up a complex search on the desktop and always have the results at hand on your phone.

Email Gateway:
When you created an Evernote account, you were given a special email address for sending notes, images and sound files into your account. You can see this address or change it from the "settings" page on the full web client. You can use this capability to email or SMS (via an email gateway) notes from your phone into your account, which can then be searched or browsed from anywhere.

IMAP:
If your mobile device has an IMAP client, you can configure it to point to your Evernote account and pull down your notes as IMAP folders. Depending on the specific implementation of your IMAP client, this should let you have locally-cached copies of your notes and allow for searching and browsing.

Type 2 – "Capture" Client

You can install a small Evernote client on some phones and mobile devices that makes it easy to create new notes and can be configured to automatically upload all (or some) photos and sound files into your Evernote account. These clients make your phone an ideal "capturing" device, since you don’t have to worry about syncing or emailing notes. You just snap a picture or record a voice note using your phone’s built-in media capabilities, and know that you’ll always be able to find it later from any computer or device. It’s like "fire and forget", but instead of forgetting, you remember.

In the current beta, such clients are available for Windows Pocket PC and Windows Mobile phones, but we’ll also be releasing them for J2ME (including BlackBerry), Symbian, iPhone and Android in the future.

These small clients will not have local note storage or browsing capabilities – you’ll have to use the browser or IMAP interfaces for that (described above), or wait until the next phase…

Type 3 – Full Client

Eventually, the "capture" clients will be extended into "full" clients by adding local storage, browsing and searching capabilities. The main advantage of the full client will be that you can access your notes without a live network connection and without having to rely on your IMAP. This type of client is not currently available in the beta, but we’ll post more details about our development schedules as they become available.

Hopefully, there’s enough "mobile" functionality now to satisfy a few people and more will be coming soon. Thanks again to the beta testers! You’re making Evernote a better company every day.