1. Evernote Notebook
2. Moleskine Evernote Notebook

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1. The Anatomy of a Moleskine Evernote Smart Notebook

The new Evernote Smart Notebook designed by Moleskine uses Evernote's Page Camera feature to capture the pages of your notebook with your smartphone or tablet. Evernote Page Camera is available for the current iOS and Android release. Evernote Smart Notebook features unique 'Evernote ruled' and 'Evernote squared' page styles with dotted lines designed to ensure a clean image when digitally.

• The Smart Notebook's biggest value is that includes three months of Evernote Premium. That service normally runs $5 a month, and the 3.5-inch x 5.5-inch Moleskine normally costs $12 —so you save.
• Save emails to Evernote and organize them with the rest of the project, or quickly add notes from Evernote to any Outlook email to share them with others. Get tasks and projects done with Nozbe, available on all your devices and integrated with Evernote, Dropbox and GCal.

Since 1997, Moleskine has been in the business of creating high-end notebooks geared to business people, artists, and anyone looking to record their ideas on paper. Meanwhile, as the digital revolution has swept the world, Evernote has emerged as an industry leader in developing versatile note-taking and information management apps for the Apple iPhone and iPad, as well as for desktop computers.

In an effort to give users the best of both worlds, Moleskine and Evernote have teamed up to create a line of Moleskine Evernote Smart Notebooks. These notebooks allow users to write, sketch, draw, or even paint their ideas within stylish, hardbound, paper-based notebooks, and then scan the pages of their notebooks directly into the Evernote app using the camera that’s built in to the iOS mobile devices.

The Evernote software allows the scanned notes to be annotated, viewed, organized, achieved, printed, and shared with ease, as well as automatically synced with versions of Evernote running on an Apple iPhone, iPad, Android mobile device, the web, and/or a PC or Mac computer. Thus, people who are comfortable handwriting information or hand-drawing their ideas using their favorite writing instruments and traditional paper can continue to do so, but still benefit from the technological features offered by the Evernote app and software.

The Anatomy of a Moleskine Evernote Smart Notebook

Currently, several versions of the Moleskine Evernote Smart Notebooks are available from Apple Stores, high-end office supply stores, booksellers, and online. Priced at $24.95 each, notebook options include a pocket-sized, 3.5 inch by 5.5 inch notebook, with 96 sheets (192 pages) of ruled paper, as well as a pocket-sized notebook containing squared (graph) paper. There are also large-ruled and large-squared hardcover notebooks available. Priced at $29.95 each, they measure 5 inches by 8.25 inches, and contain 120 sheets (240 pages).

What sets the Moleskine Evernote Smart Notebooks apart from the company’s other stylish and high-end hardcover notebooks is that these utilize lightly printed, dotted lines on each page that are designed exclusively for use with the free Evernote app (available for many mobile devices, including the iPhone or iPad). This app allows users to easily use their mobile device’s built-in, rear-facing camera to quickly line up and scan individual pages of the notebook so that the content can be accurately captured and incorporated into the Evernote app or software.

Each Moleskine Evernote Smart Notebook comes with a free, three-month subscription to the Evernote Premium service (a $15 value), as well as several sheets of colorful “smart stickers” that can be used on notebook pages to help categorize and tag written or drawn content. These icon-based stickers are recognized by the app when pages are scanned, allowing for scanned pages to be automatically organized.

Each hardcover Moleskine Evernote Smart Notebook is designed to be durable and archive the written, drawn, or sketched content included within them for decades. As a result, Moleskine notebooks are used as journals and diaries, scrapbooks, sketchbooks, and notepads by all sorts of creative individuals and business professionals who prefer to record their thoughts and ideas on traditional paper.

Note taking has been around since of course long before they were computers. And there is definitely a difference in the process when you’re taking notes by hand.

That probably surprises you coming from me.

Recently I have in fact rediscovered the difference and even the importance of that difference between taking notes by hand versus writing them in some digital format. The Evernote Moleskine notebook combines the best of both of these worlds.

The Evernote Moleskine notebook intrigued me when I first started to understand what they were and what they did.

It’s the perfect combination. I can take most of my notes with Evernote, but when I feel inclined to take them by hand.

Not to worry, nothing will be lost. I can take notes by hand using the Evernote Moleskine notebooks. Then I take my photo note with Evernote to preserve that note permanently.

The idea is great and the notebook seems ideal but I did run into some problems when I got my first Evernote Moleskine notebook.

I immediately wrote down a test note in my brand new Evernote Moleskine notebook.

I applied one sticker, checked off the check box for the reminder, and also wrote something in the private notes section. I wanted to test every aspect of this notebook and how it works with the Evernote app.

Everything I tried seem to fail.

Nothing seemed to be able to get the Evernote app to recognize that this was a note coming from an Evernote Moleskine notebook.

The reminders didn’t work.

The private part of the note didn’t work.

The sticker didn’t even work at first.

Evernote Notebook

How to get the stickers in the Evernote Moleskine notebooks to work.

After trying everything else that I could think of, I tried one more thing.

I tried saving the photo note in each of the available formats.

This is where I found the solution at least insofar as how it works with the sticker.

The format of the photo that you save has to be a “color document.”

Any other photo format that you save will not work. At least not on the Android.

Then I commenced to find out why the reminder and the private sections weren’t working.

Moleskine support told me I needed to talk to Evernote.

Evernote support didn’t seem to be reading my comments as I initially got back the generic instructions for how the notebooks work with Evernote. The same lack of documentation and explanation frustrated me.

After going back and forth several times, I even sent a short video.

I finally got somebody who was able to pay attention and give me the proper answer.

The reminders feature and the private section of the note do not work with Androids only with iOS.

So if you’re an app on iOS user you’re in luck you have access to all the features that the Evernote Moleskine notebook offers.

If you’re an Android User like me the only thing you get to use are the stickers. These stickers are pretty and fun but for $25 I could get four notebooks at the local supermarket and essentially accomplish the same thing.

So here’s the rub

To be honest it doesn’t save me a whole lot of time to be able to use the stickers to tell Evernote which notebook and tags to use. I can do that myself very easily in the app, immediately after I’ve taken my photo note.

So there you have it my review of the Moleskine Evernote notebook.

It’s cool.

I like it.

I’m sending some out as gifts to some people this year, but in retrospect if I knew how it didn’t work originally, I probably would have found another gift to give.

Moleskine Evernote Notebook

Still the idea of it is very cool and the notebooks are pretty nice so I’m not totally upset that I got this and I think the people I’m sending them is too will really appreciate it – especially that it came from me.