The note-taking and -syncing service Evernote now has a Windows Phone app that's uniquely designed for this particular platform. You can pin notes from your Evernote account to the Windows Phone home screen, for example, for quick access to them. Overall, the Evernote service is a powerful one well worth using, and if you have a Windows Phone, you'll definitely want to install this free app.

Some dedicated Windows users will punt on Evernote in favor of Microsoft's note-taking and syncing service, OneNote. While that may largely be a personal choice, I will say that Evernote does integrate with dozens of other services, and quite smoothly at that. Evernote also has pretty incredible search functionality, especially for Premium subscribers ($5 per month or $45 per year) because the app can find words and phrases not just in your Evernote notes, but also in attachments uploaded to Evernote and other documents on your phone. Evernote can also search handwriting that appears in images uploaded to your account (think whiteboards), which OneNote cannot do.

Unique to Windows Phone
The first thing that surprised me about the Windows Phone app for Evernote is that looks remarkably different from other Evernote mobile apps.  Take a look, for example, at the image below that shows the Evernote mobile app, side-by-side, on three mobile platforms: Evernote for Windows Phone (left), Evernote for iPhone (center), and Evernote for Android (right).

As a long-time Evernote user, I find certain aspects of each of these versions of the app slightly confusing. They all have their quirks. In the Windows Phone version, for example, when searching for notes, I found I had to be vigilant about whether I was already in a notebook, in which case my search would be limited to only notes in that notebook. To search your entire Evernote account, you have to make sure you back out in the main screen first.

Speaking of search, one of my favorite features of Evernote is that it uses OCR to search handwritten text it finds in images. I upload a lot of photos of recipes, and this feature makes it so I don't have to retype any of them. In the iPhone version of the app, when you search for a term and Evernote finds a match in an image, it highlights it for you. Neither the Windows Phone version nor the Android version of Evernote do this, however. In all three mobile versions, Evernote does highlight found search terms in typed text, but the handwritten text highlighting is limited to the iPhone app.

One aspect of the Evernote Windows Phone app that I found confusing is in the options it presents in different situations. In the slideshow (slide 5), you'll find an example of a screenshot that shows options for what you can do with Reminders, but icons on that screen show additional options that are irrelevant in that particular context. I wish I only saw options for actions that were pertinent to what I am trying to do at the moment.

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Customizations
You can view notes that you've created and saved to Evernote in both list form or as cards. When an image is included in the note, its card shows a thumbnail.

Another option that makes sense to enable is a four-digit PIN. The lock only turns on after 10 minutes of inactivity, and you cannot adjust that limit in Evernote's Windows Phone app. The lock applies to both the app and any notes you've pinned to your Windows Phone home screen.

One of the reasons I love Evernote as much as I do is in how it gives you tools to organize your notes. Evernote lets you save notes into notebooks, and notebooks can be further organized into "stacks" of notebooks. For example, I have a PCMag stack, which comprises a few separate notebooks for special projects, meeting notes, and general work. In addition to notebooks and stacks, Evernote also gives you tags so that you can add metadata to better help you find notes later or find similar notes in snap.

From the Windows Phone app for Evernote, you can edit and adjust all these organizational aspects of Evernote, reassigning tags, deleting unused tags, shuffling notes into the appropriate notebook, and so on. You can create new notebooks from the app, but you can't rearrange stacks. You'll need the one of the desktop client versions of Evernote or the Web app for that.

Premium vs. Free

Evernote is a freemium service. All the apps are free, and you can do a great deal with a free account, but extra features are available to those to who pay $45 per year or $5 per month for a Premium subscription.

Free account holders get everything described to this point, except for the ability to search inside PDFs, as well as a number of features I haven't mentioned yet: geolocation tagging of notes, a dictation tool, reminders, the ability to record audio memos. Free users also have more upload constraints: 60MB per month (with no total limit over the lifetime of the account), and note size and attachment size maxed out at 25MB. Premium users, meanwhile, get 1GB upload allowance per month, as well as 100MB limit on notes and attachments. Both free and Premium account holders can have up to 100,000 notes.

My favorite features for Premium users of the mobile app is the ability to save notebooks offline, which means you don't need an Internet connection to access and edit existing notes. All your changes sync to the cloud the next time an Internet connection is available, and if you forget to sync and further change the note in another one of Evernote's apps, the service will try to help you keep track of the differences with a "Conflicting Changes" notebook that it will create for you.

Put Evernote on Your Windows Phone
Evernote is a superb service, and I love that the Windows Phone app is uniquely designed for that platform. It's an Editors' Choice Windows Phone app, and one that we highly recommend you download.