Are you ready for Evernnote Plan changes

By looking at how bright this image is it kind of tells you that Evernote is hesitant and letting you know exactly what their plans are and letting you keep able to actually read what it is that are your options. The biggest thing that struck me is that with the basic plan you can only sync across two devices. Very few of us in this day of age have only two devices that they're working with but I'm sure there are some of you out there that are falling into this category. So, Evernote has fallen into the category of giving you a taste of their product with the free plan to move you into their pay for plans to make it actually functional.

While I don't bemoan the fact that they are trying to become viable, I can't help but be glad that I long ago moved over to using Microsoft's OneNote. OneNote gives me all the integrations with the rest of Microsoft's products and operating systems and allows me to share the information across as many devices as I care to. While in theory OneNote is still a paid for product it does come with every one of Microsoft Office suites. LEARN MORE ABOUT BASIC

Granted that $34.99 per year for the plus package and $69.99 per year for the premium package really isn't that expensive for what you're getting. But the basic package you really don't get much of anything. If you buy into the plus package at $34.99 per year then you are not limited to the number of devices that you can use the program on. You get 1 GB of storage capacity and you can access your notebooks without being online, forward emails into Evernote and you get customer support but only through email communication. LEARN MORE ABOUT PLUS

The premium package for $69.99 per year, takes you up to 10 GB of storage, adds customer support through live chat, allows you to search for text in PDF's, search for text in attached office documents, allows you to imitate PDFs, gives you the ability to scan and digitize business cards, provides the opportunity for presenting your notes, gives you an audit trail allowing you to browse the history of your notes and does a cross referencing so that you can see related notes and content. LEARN MORE ABOUT PREMIUM

So if you want a closer look at the pricing listed below click here and it will take you to Evernote's pricing page. For me, I am going to be sticking with Microsoft's OneNote program.

Users upset by Evernote price hikes & two-device limit for free Basic customers

This is a bummer if you are still using Evernote and your prime note taking app. Especially  the two device limit. The whole reason for using Evernote, when I was, was to have one application that I could pick up any device on and access the data. Now if you wish to do this, you will have to migrate to their Plus or Premium version subscription. While the price is not significant:

The price of a Plus subscription is being hiked from $2.99 per month to $3.99 per month, although annually the cost is cheaper at $34.99. Premium is seeing a stepper increase, from $4.99 to $7.99 per month — a 12-month version of the plan is $69.99.

if you wanted to stay with their free version you will have to deal with the limitations. Here is a comparison list of the different versions of Evernote.

Evernote Premium account now has Document Search

The amount of storage is not the only reason to go Premium with Evernote. Yes the prime reason to go premium is to increase your upload capacity but you also get the following benefits:

• Larger upload capacity to 1GB each month
• Offline Notebooks- easily access your data when you don’t have a network connection (iOS and Android only)
• Share your notes with others – allows you easily share your notes with other members of your team
• Each Note can be up to 100MB’s in size
• On iOS and Android devices you can add a lock to the Evernote app to provide an extra level of security
• When you attach a document in a note that are either office documents or PDF files they are fully searchable including scanned PDFs
• Premium includes versioning. This is particularly helpful when sharing notes to be able to go back in history to previous versions of notes.
• Images are also searchable if they contain text within the image.While this process is not limited to the Premium subscription but the images are processed faster. Evernote puts them at a higher priority if you have a Premium Account.
• Last but not least you also get priority support. You will be sent to the front of the queue for a faster support response.

Google Keep, is it worth looking at?

Google’s new note taking program seems to be taking a stab at the higher end note taking applications. Evernote of course is what comes to my mind being the current top contender in this application category. Evernote was initially put together as an application that can be accessed by many types of devices so your data is available to you no matter how you access. It is a product that has far surpassed Microsoft’s OneNote which was the first to market and failed to capture the market share I thought it deserved primarily because it was only available on the Microsoft desktops. OneNote has been slow to coming to the cloud and this has been what has been holding it back. Evernote is still king and both Google Keep and OneNote will have a hard battle ahead of them to surpass its current lead.

Here is a great comparison article by Christina Warren of Mashable discussing the differences between Evernote and Google Keep. Her conclusion, Evernote’s list of capabilities far exceed what Google is bringing to game. However, if you are a heavy Google application user, Keep’s integration with Google Drive might make it more appealing to you.

Evernote for Android get some great updates

Press Release March 27th: Today, we have an exciting update to Evernote for Android (3.6). We’ve added a great speech-to-text capability that makes dictating notes in Evernote really easy, plus we have a bunch of new features for the Evernote Widget app.  Get Evernote for Android and get the Evernote Widget App for Android

Speech-to-text feature:

While all of the Evernote apps have the ability to capture audio, the Android version will now provide speech recognition. Tap the new speech bubble icon in the tool bar above the keyboard to launch the feature. As you talk, the app instantly places your spoken words into the body of the note as text.

When you are done recording both the original audio as well as the converted text will be attached to you note. This allows you to easily search you audio notes. If you don’t want the speech-to-text conversion then tap and hold the speech bubble and it will switch to just a microphone. Tap the microphone to begin recording you message.

The speech-to-text conversion uses Google Android’s text transcription service you must be on line for it to work. This capability is also available on version 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and some versions of 2.2. If you see the speech-to-text option appear when you update then you will know that your phone or tablet supports this function.

New Widget Features:

Press Release: In this update we’ve added a bunch of great new capabilities to our widget app, available as a separate download from the Google Play Store.

Here is what TechSmith had to say about this update:

Customize your widget
We’ve added a new gear icon to the widget that lets you customize a number of features:

• Widget Color: Choose between original green or a new dark theme
• Custom buttons Choose which Evernote functions appear in the widget
• Large widget notes Choose what notes appears in the large widget—last viewed; last updates; specific notebooks, tags, or Saved Searches

New tiny widget
When you long press on the phone’s home screen and go to the Widget menu, you’ll now see a tiny 1×1 single function Evernote widget, which takes up the same screen real estate as an app icon. This widget is great for placing a single Evernote function anywhere you like.

Quick snapshot
The newest widget function is the Quick Snapshot. This feature truly lives up to its name. Tap on the Quick Snapshot icon, camera with lightning bolt, to launch the camera. Snap your photo and tap save. That’s it. A new snapshot note will be added to your Evernote account with an auto-generated title.

Evernote vs. OneNote

And the battle goes on. There have been some recent updates to both of these programs that have prompted me to take another look to see which one is better suited for what I need.

Evernote’s general capabilities are still not as rich on the PC/Desktop side as they are in OneNote but it still has a better overall feel and function between all of the different devices that you can bring it up on. I have listed a table below on some of the major features and how each product rates in respect to each other.

Feature	Evernote	OneNote
Notebook –this feature allows you to group notes together to make them easier to access	Two Level-You can create a master Group and then have notebook containers listed within the master Group or container.	On the surface it appears that you only have two levels here as well however, you may have as many Notebooks that you want. The second level is called a section in OneNote but there are two types of sections that you can create, the first is a Section Group which can create one or more Sections or more Section Groups. A Section then is what actually is the container for your note pages.
Free Form Entries	You don’t have this with Evernote	You can place your entries anywhere you wish on the note. I really like this feature and I miss it with Evernote.
Text Style	The basics are here but they are very limited.	A much richer choice of controls to enhance your text styles. You can create a much richer end product here.
Web Versions	Very similar whether you use the Web Interface or the Desktop Interface.	The Web interface is poor at best not only to the desktop version but also to what Evernote provides. This is the one feature that is a tipping point for me to continue using Evernote as my primary note taking application.
iPad App	Again, this is very similar to the both the Web and Desktop Apps. This makes it much simpler to move from one device to another.	Ugh! The newly released app is ten time better than it was but it still is a poor cousin to anything else. Still not good enough. Evernote wins here as well.
Application Interfaces	Evernote is very strong when it comes to integrating on the iPad with other applications. It should since this is the world that it has mostly evolved in. More and more secondary apps that I use have tie ins to not only Evernote but also Dropbox that these features keep me coming back.	OneNote has very strong tie ins with other Office Applications that I use a lot. This makes it very hard for me to stop using it but in reality, other than the task management associated with Outlook many of the other features that I want can also be found in Evernote.

So, for me I still lean towards Evernote as my primary note program but I still find myself jumping into OneNote when I need that extra formatting or connection to Outlook.

Let me know your thoughts!