Evernote hops onto BlackBerry phones

(Credit: Evernote)

A brand-new BlackBerry app joined the Evernote family on Monday. The multiplatform, multimedia note-taking service has already been uploading voice, text, images, and files from the desktop (Mac|Windows), Web, Windows Mobile phones, and the iPhone. The addition of BlackBerry rounds out Evernote's presence on major smartphone operating systems, though it's likely that if the Palm Pre takes off, the company will continue development for Palm's WebOS.

Like Evernote on other mobile platforms, Evernote for BlackBerry (download) lets you upload a text note, voice clip, picture, or file to your cloud-based Evernote account. The signature green interface is clean, and quick and easy to navigate on the BlackBerry Bold, my test device. Simply scroll with the track ball to move through the four notetaking icons on the start screen, or pop down to the bottom to search a note by its tag. Pressing the Menu key reveals options to view recently-created notes, notes pending uploading, and an option to activate GPS.

The application's performance depends heavily on how strong your data connection is. On a weak data or Wi-Fi network, loading your history of notes could test your patience, but on a fast connection, the notes you took on the desktop or Web are easy enough to browse or search by tag. We should note that the method for playing back voice notes requires you to download or open the captured voice file on the BlackBerry's media player--too bad there's no direct method to bring the player's functionality into Evernote itself. However, the app also includes some keyboard-skirting shortcuts that let you populate the descriptions area of an upload with previously-used tags.

Evernote for BlackBerry is a "freemium" product; the core capturing and search features are free, but subscriptions for storing multimedia notes online beyond the first 40MB per month sell for $5 per month (or $45 per year.) The application is compatible with the Bold, Storm, and Curve 8900 series phones, and should also work on future phones running operating systems 4.6 and higher. As of today, Evernote for BlackBerry is exclusively available through the BlackBerry App World application.