3Banana Brings Streamlined Notetaking to Android, iPhone

March 20th, 2009 Nathan Hale posted in 'Mobility', 'Notetaking'

As a recent convert over to the Android side of mobile phone operating systems, I’ve been looking for a great way to capture notes on go, on or off line, and be able to sync up to a web service for easy retrieval. Until very recently, I was at a complete loss for such an application. Enter 3banana, a new application for mobile capture for the Android and iPhone platforms.

So far, the application and its web counterpoint, while young, are pretty much bustling with features. Here’s what I really like so far:

  • Simple, clean interfaces on both the website and the mobile application make taking notes easy and enjoyable. The single greatest reason I don’t take take more notes on my phone is that it’s usually a pain. 3banana goes a long way toward making things simple enough to actually be usable.
  • Tagging your notes is so easy. All you have to do to tag a note is put “#YOURTAG” somewhere in the body of your note. Simple as pie. No complicated interfaces for creating new tags; it just happens on the fly–and that’s the way it should be.
  • You can take pictures and easily embed those in your notes! This is a fantastic way to easily archive your photos online, or you can add comments and share instantly via Twitter, Facebook, or a public url. Heck you can do this with any note.
  • Share notes via the above mentioned methods, or generate a barcode that can be scanned by other Android users. This is one slick feature, and definitely a really cool and creative use of the barcode function on T-Mobile G1 phones.
  • A bookmarklet is available you can take notes from anywhere, and have them instantly available on your phone.
  • Even more features like clickable phone numbers and html support round out the package.

While there’s a lot of great stuff there, a few things are holding me back from really using 3banana for large portion of my notetaking. First, there’s no way to export notes…which is an absolute must for me. Customer support has assured me via email that this is in the works, though. Second, there’s no way to search your notes by tag or any other way in the mobile application. This really makes it practically impossible to use as your note collection grows. As soon as these two features are implemented, though, I’ll be using 3banana full force.

Find out more:

Have you used 3banana for Android or iPhone? What’s your favorite mobile notetaking app? Let’s discuss!


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