iPhone by Steve

When it comes to making notes, many of us in our increasingly paperless society have eschewed pen and paper in favor of the electronic gadgets we carry in our pockets, namely our cell phones. What’s more, taking notes electronically means that you’ll always have them for quick and easy reference. Beats a pocket full of paper scraps, doesn’t it?

The iPhone has it’s own built-in Notes app, but curiously, notes can’t be synchronized or backed up in an easy way. I’m pretty certain that the new iPhone 2.0 will fix this problem and it’s likely that somebody will develop an application to handle this soon, but for the millions of you out there who are stuck with your first generation iPhone, you’ll probably want a better note taking app than the original.

But better doesn’t always mean more complicated. Sometimes, the KISS method (”keep it simple, stupid”) is the best way to go, and for sheer usability and simplicity, you won’t need to look any farther than PogoNotes.

PogoNotes is a web-based note taking app that covers all the basics in easy-to-use fashion. It works in Firefox so you can use it on your computer, and there is also a very nice iPhone interface.

I found the iPhone interface very easy to look at and use. The screens are iPhone friendly and look very much like the email screens or your contacts screen—all type is large, well organized and easy to read. It’s very easy to compose a new note or to edit an existing one, and, because the software is web-based, your notes will be available to you from any computer with an Internet connection or from your iPhone, no synchronization necessary.

PogoNotes has a feature that lets you share notes with others, so if limited collaboration is important to you, you’ll be able to get the job done with PogoNotes. You an share your notes with groups and can password protect them, as well as search by zip code.

PogoNotes covers everything you’d expect from a simple note taking app, and it does so with ease and style. So what good, if any, is the iPhone’s built-in Notes app? Well, actually, I still use it, but only for notes that I don’t intend to keep for very long. I use Notes for grocery lists, use it to collect things I want to buy the next time I run errands, and that sort of thing. It works great for that, but for notes that I intend to keep permanently, I go with PogoNotes.

In a future post, I’ll detail Evernote, a more full-featured and innovative note taking app. But if your main goal is to take and save text based notes, you’ll find the PogoNotes interface to be easy and pleasant to use on your totally cool iPhone.