There are just too many things to remember, so I write them down. I have a half-dozen different address books dating back to college. I have tried small notebooks, sticky notes, business card folders, and day calendars from large to pocket size. The trouble with address books is that they are not exactly portable. Notebooks work until they are full. I hated extracting all the useful information from the old notebook, and putting it in a new one. Business card folders became full, and the Rolodex was not exactly portable. I tried pocket calendars, but every December meant transferring information from one year to the next. Sticky notes were great, until I was drowned in sticky notes. Even color coding different topics didn’t make find the right sticky note much easier.

I tried storing more information on my desktop, but then it wasn’t on my laptop. It was not organized, and it was never available when I really needed the information. I tried browser synchronization, but trying to synchronize Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera is not easy. The advent of smartphones only added one more device to the crazy mix. Android Robot doesn’t synchronize with any other browser. Android Firefox is still a work-in-progress, and Opera was not my default browser on my netbook. I was excited about Google Chrome for Android, but it is only available on Ice Cream Sandwich. I had information stored in too many places, and they were not synchronized.

Then I came across Evernote. It took six months of testing Evernote, and looking for alternatives, before I settled on Evernote as the best solution to most of my organization problems. The triggering point was creating a to-do list for becoming a temporary resident in Costa Rica. I then kept adding more and more notes to Evernote, including a note of the IMEI numbers for my phones. What makes Evernote special is that every note I store on Evernote is available on all my devices.

Evernote is available for the following mobile devices: Android, Apple iOS (iPhone and iPad), Blackberry, Blackberry Playbook, Microsoft Phone 7, and HP WebOS from their market. For computers, there are Evernote apps for MacOS and Windows. Evernote has browser extensions for Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and the Dolphin Browser HD. Evernote is not just limited to software. A few of the hardware devices that integrate to Evernote are the Canon P-150 scanner, the Doxie Go scanner, the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner, and the Hover Cam. You can even use Eye-Fi to send pictures from your camera directly to Evernote. Of course, you can just log into your account at the Evernote Web site.

Evernote is all about creating notes, which can be saved in a notebook. The default notebook is your account name, but you can create any number of additional notebooks. Notes are not limited to text. A note can include attachments, such as pictures, audio files, videos, PDF files, and other files. You can take a photo, or record an audio note. When you add a note, it appears on every device, and can be edited from every device. The Web browser extensions allow you to make a note of a complete Web page, or just a portion of a Web page.

For those enjoying a trip to the beaches during Semana Santa, you can create a notebook that is a photo album of your vacation. If you are planning a vacation to Costa Rica, you can store flight itineraries, hotel reservations, car reservations, annotated maps, and every other document that you may need on your trip. During your trip, you can create a notebook of your adventure with your photos, and stories. Those of you who are cooks, and I am not one, can create a notebook for recipes. Each recipe could include a photo of the dish. You could create a Costa Rica cookbook. You can even share notebooks with family and friends.

Evernote provides additional tools that enhance its flexibility. Evernote Clearly is a a browser extension for Google Chrome and Firefox. Evernote Clearly reformats a Web page to eliminate all the extraneous material on the page, and consolidates multi-page articles into a single page. You can then save this page as a note. Skitch is a fun app that allows you to making drawings and highlights on a snapshot, gallery photo, map, or blank page and then save it as a note. Skitch is available as on option when creating a note, and as a separate Skitch app. There are also may third-party apps that integrate with Evernote. Future app reviews will mention this feature, for the apps that support it.

Evernote Premium adds additional features. Heavy Evernote users can store up to 1 Gigabyte of new content each month. The premium account also provides for searchable PDF files, faster recognition of images that contain text, off-line storage of notebooks on Android devices, iPhones, and Windows 7 Phones. Plus, you have the option of suppressing ads. The premium account costs $5 USD a month, or $45 USD a year. They do accept Costa Rica credit and debit cards.