This is Big! The new iPad has been my constant companion for the last few weeks. It is a great machine for blogging, taking notes, and wonderful as a media consumption device. But with the addition of cameras, the iPad 2 is also a personal productivity bonanza.
With the free download of the productivity software Evernote, this little powerhouse can now be a capture device. Evernote allows you to take notes and store them in the “cloud” and also store pictures. This is where the productivity increase comes from. I can now take pictures of meeting agendas, business cards, and a whole collection of sticky notes and save them online.
Since Evernote can be installed on my regular PC, I can quickly access my saved notes and photos right on my desk. This not only improves productivity, it also makes it very convenient to organize ideas and create new documents. I can also cut and paste my notes into my paper based productivity tools such as my daily top 6 planner. This gives me the best of both worlds… Paper and digital.
Now instead of coming back from a meeting with a stack of sticky notes, business cards, and scraps of paper, I now come back with a couple of photo scans. Evernote also has a basic OCR program which turns scanned text into regular text which can be copied and pasted into almost any document. The other nice thing about the text recognition is that it lets you search your graphics that have words in them from the embedded search interface. This really can save a lot of time if you have a lot of notes.
Evernote also allows me to record audio, which works well for lectures and is just a simple click from the Evernote interface. The audio plays back well and will help you remember the finer points of a speech or lecture. Overall, if you have an iPad 2, you should definitely check out Evernote. The productivity improvement can be huge!
