Want a Head Start on MobileMe? Try Evernote

The promise of Apple's forthcoming MobileMe application and service -- to be able to access your contacts, email and data from anywhere, on multiple types of devices -- is that the cloud becomes your own, personal data center and you're never tied to a single place or a PC for your vital information.

MobileMe is set to ship to market by mid-July, and Apple has already begun taking pre-orders. But a neat little application, Evernote, already does some of that for producing, organizing and syncing notes, Web pages, audio and graphics for availability on just about anything with a Web connection. It works as both a desktop application and a Web-based application, and the company that created it, also called Evernote, of Sunnyvale, Calif., has customized a portal for the iPhone.

Evernote works well.

During the work week, it was a breeze to take several dozen notes and save screen captures of a couple of different Web pages to Evernote's desktop software. With the click of a button, the notes syncronized to password-protected, Web-based folders. On the weekend, it was possible to access the notes on a home PC and via iPhone (although on the iPhone it's just static content and you can't edit or add to notes.) Evernote is also accessible via Windows Mobile and Mac platforms.

Evernote allows the user to tag notes for better organization. After several hundred or thousand notes that are saved, it will let you do simple searches by tag to find the precise notes for which you're searching. Notes can be emailed or printed; individual notes can be dragged-and-dropped between "notebooks" to move them around. The application supports a number of file formats, including text, html, jpeg, gif, png, wav, mp3 and an ink format. (The ink function actually worked very well when notes were taken on a Fujitsu Lifebook T2010 tablet PC.)

All in all, Evernote is simple but powerful.

The company offers Evernote in two flavors: Premium or Free. Premium will run $5 a month or $45 a year for up to 500 MB worth of uploaded notes each month (about the equivalent of one-to-two novels), as well as stronger security and support. Free accounts get you up to 40 MB worth of notes each month.

So what's Evernote got that you can't find from, say, Google Docs or Microsoft Live Office? Evernote -- even the free version -- has a robustness, ease of installation and use, portability and efficiency they don't have. As it is, it could very well push Microsoft and Google to play catch-up in those areas. It's certainly worth a test drive for a couple of weeks until MobileMe is finally shipping.