Well well well...does springpad has pc support?
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Springpad :
- Free
- Supports "open in.." on iPad
- small size
But...
- doesn't have a desktop app, using a rather slow & clunky web interface instead.
- wastes lots of screen real estate on useless borders & "social" icons.
- no offline mode on desktop.
- Offline mode on mobile is limited to text - so no attachments available offline.
- no OCR search in PDFs or Jpegs with text.
- no handwritten notes
Evernote
- fastest for the quick "fire and forget" type notes
- basic handwriting support via Skitch or more extensive via Penultimate (but Penultimate is slow to start)
- full OCR search in PDFs
- iOS version has all features of desktop version
- No overall limit on size of your database in the cloud
- Offline database on desktop client.
- Supports "open in.." on iPad
But:
- to get Evernote offline on mobile devices, must buy a $45 per year subscription.
- 60mb / month upload limit without subscription.
- to me, the interface is a bit spartan and formatting options are scarce
-
Need to buy premium subscription to encrypt your database on the desktop or mobile. not true actually.... Only the note is protected, not the attachment. So assume everything you attach into Evernote d/b can be read by someone on EN staff or a hacker, unless you encrypt it first.
OneNote
- full offline access to all content of synced notebooks on mobile devices
- no size limit (other than OneDrive storage limit)
- Greatest formatting options
- Extremely powerful desktop client. Beats Evernote for PC by a mile, Springpad by a lightyear.
- OCR search available in PDFs and Jpegs with text - but only if you added them on the desktop client.
But..
- Huge. I anticipate losing a full gig on OneNote + a decent size database. The program alone is nearly half a gig on the iPad.
- No "open in..." on iPad. If I want to add a PDF to OneNote, I must either do it on the desktop, or take a screenshot.
- A couple seconds slower to start than Evernote.
- Tags can be added on iOS, but can't be searched. (OneNote uses tags differently from Evernote, though). To use Tags as categories the way EN does, the easiest way is to just type them into the note.
- You can only share info with others from the iOS client via OneDrive link or a dumb screenshot. Evernote allows sending the whole note in the body of email.
- You can't password protect OneNote database if you plan on using it on iPad.
- No reminders on iPad.
So, it's a tough one... For me, going by the features and performance alone, Evernote Premium would be a win over OneNote, although by a hair. But $45 a year is not cheap, at least for what I use it for, and given the competition. It's like buying a brand new iPad every 10 years and giving it to Evernote. If I used it all the time for all kinds of work, sure. But for storing information I may only look at once in a blue moon, too pricey. On the other hand, OneNote is slower and way bigger. Not an easy choice.
As for the Springpad - not being able to access attachments offline, no offline mode on the desktop, no desktop client, and screwy interface make it worse than Evernote free. So I am not even considering it.