What I’m Looking At: Evernote and Moleskine’s New Evernote Smart Notebook

Recently, Evernote and Moleskine released a new product: an Evernote-friendly Moleskine notebook that is being called the Evernote Smart Notebook. The notebooks come in two sizes, and the paper is specially formatted to make best use of Evernote’s amazing text recognition capabilities.

The older I get, the more I need to write stuff down.  I’m all about digital notes, digital calendars, digital planning. There is real benefit to me, however, in writing things down, even if it means redundancy. I love Moleskine notebooks (did you know the proper pronunciation is Mole-a-skee-nah, with the accent on the “skee”?). When I heard Evernote and Moleskine were working on something together, I had to check it out.

The process is: write your handwritten notes in your Evernote Smart Notebook, snap pics of the pages with your smart phone, and get those pictures into Evernote, via email, or by creating a new note in your Evernote Smartphone App and using the camera to snap a photo to be included in the note.

It takes a few minutes for the note to sync up to the server, and onto the Evernote app you have on your computer. Once synchronized, Evernote’s amazing text recognition is yours for the enjoyment.

Yesterday I added a note with a name written in cursive – not print. When I searched Evernote on my computer for the name, the first hit that came up was the entry where I’d written the name in cursive. It really amazed me!

Evernote text recognition works best when you print neatly, to be sure.  And, text recognition works outside of the Moleskine notebook (but the paper in the Moleskine will improve recognition). Nonetheless, this is just the motivation that you may be looking for to start snapping pictures of all the little handwritten scraps of notes you currently have on your desk, and send them into Evernote.

Don’t worry – with Evernote’s amazing text recognition abilities, you’ll find your notes when you’re looking for them later on.

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Tagged as: Evernote, handwritten, imaging, Moleskine, note taking, OCR, paper planning, smartphone, text recognition, what i'm looking at, WILA