Tablets are great devices because of their portability to be taken anywhere and their flexibility to be used in different ways. You can use your tablet for gaming, internet, movies, music, email, productivity, and much more. In fact, I would say that productivity is where tablets maybe under utilized with much more potential. The development of new productivity apps like office products and remote desktop are allowing tablets to compete with traditional laptops. Notetaking is specially useful on a tablet because its size perfectly matches a traditional notepad but yet you can do so much more. There are many note taking apps including the popular Evernote but today I’ll cover a brand new app. BeNote was designed from scratch and has a whole new feel and look unlike any other app. So let’s take a closer look and see what BeNote has to offer.
BeNote is a very different notetaking app and it’s absolutely perfect for meeting, projects, class, and in general to organize ideas which is the goal of notetaking. It forces you to take notes in specific ways that makes it actually useful for later. We can all remember taking notes in class then looking at it later and not understanding anything we wrote. Well, with BeNote you’re not going to have those kind of problems anymore. Let’s checkout in detail how BeNote is set up.
The BeNote home screen consists of a left pane with topics and the right pane with your notes for that topic. A topic is probably the first things you want to create and organize. You can create topics around projects like work meetings, classes, home projects or anything else. Notes can be easily assigned to multiple projects if needed. Once you have a topic created then you can start with your first note. I have created a very simple note to demonstrate the different aspects of the app and how it works.
BeNote is not a free style notetaking app where you can just right anything down since that’s a very ineffective method of taking notes. Instead the app forces you to take notes around key points that forces organization and a clear thought process. These points include Participants, Key Point, Question, Decision, and Action item. You don’t have to use all of them but any notes you take must fall under one of these points. In the example above we can see that at the top we have the participants which would be me. Then there is a key point about BeNote being a notetaking app. We then ask a question of where it’s the best app which is answered with a most likely. We then make a decision to buy this app and finish with the action item to purchase by June 10, 2012. Although this a very simple example it is clear that if anyone takes a brief glance at this note they can immediately understand the purpose and conclusion without any confusion. This is the intelligence of BeNote and how it makes a very useful and productive app.
Another great feature that I really like is the ability to attach images. Not only can you add images to Key Points with notes but you can also sketch on the image. Taking that even further there is the ability to free sketch from blank as seen above. The sketch includes three pencil widths and an array of standard colors. There are sketch apps out there and notetaking apps but this is one of the few that I have seen that actually combines the two very effectively. Add a stylus and now you have a very powerful notetaking app without any limits.
Once you have created notes with participants and action items they will displayed on the home screen under you notes. So immediately upon opening the app you can see what action items need to be addressed under any topic and easily open the note if needed. So no need to try to remember what was due and have to hunt through your notes. Other features includes the ability to share notes as a text or html file. All notes can be backed up and saved to external cloud storage if desired.
Overall I would highly recommend BeNote and it’s an app that I plan on using routinely myself. It is different then your average notetaking app and it can be very effective in meetings, classes, projects, and more. Currently the app cost $1.99 and there is no free or trial version. But I would say that if your serious about taking notes then it’s worth it. There are a lot of note apps in Google Play Store and many free but none as intelligent or with all the features in this app. Try BeNote and let us know how it has helped you take better notes and get more organized.
Download BeNote ($1.99) from Google Play Store.
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