I'm sure this is not a new thing, but I tend to be a bit of a late adopter of things that cost money. However, since my boss gave me one of these fancy Evernote Smart Notebooks for Christmas, I'm going to give it a try.
My current workflow for taking notes is a bit kludgy. I am very fond of taking handwritten notes (typically with my Levenger True Writer fountain pen on a No. 18 Rhodia pad), but I want to make sure my notes are available to me whether I'm in the office, in my home office. or traveling. So I gather up my notes every week or so and run them through my scanner, name the files with the date of the notes on that page, then put the scanned files in my Google Drive. Works well enough, I suppose, but this process means that if I want to search for something specific I have to remember more or less when I wrote that note, then look in the notes for that date.
At some point I had experimented with putting those scanned notes into Evernote, but the results were far from perfect, as the attached scans appeared as linked documents, not embedded into the note itself. (I see now that that has changed, so the scanned pages appear in the body of the note itself. I think I will be transferring those scans into Evernote now.)
In addition, I sometimes use Evernote to take notes on the fly or to save some notes that someone has emailed to me. So that adds a second place to look for notes (or really a third place, for those notes that I forget to copy from email).
So here's the new thing: with the Evernote Smart Notebook, I can jot my notes as always, in a specially designed Moleskine notebook with a special grid pattern. Then I can use my smartphone to take a picture of each page, and it will not only automatically create a note in Evernote, it will do an OCR scan of the page so that I can search it from within Evernote on any device. It also has some neat tagging functionality using these little stickers that come with the notebook. It comes with a 3 month premium Evernote subscription - note sure what the benefit of that will be for me.
I think I'll try this thing out for a bit and see how it improves my note taking process.
Update:
It seems that the OCR feature is not specific to the special notebook; it works on any PNG, GIF, or JPG document, as well as any PDF that contains mostly bitmaps. That's handy! But it does make me question whether the notebook is worth it? The only thing it seems to add is the tagging - which, by the way, is limited to a set of six customizable tags, there is no ability to write a tag on the document that gets scanned.
