We've all been there, we have a notebook full of notes from a meeting or just doodles about a possible new project and for a number of reasons we want to digitize them - we may want to just have backup copies, need to send them to another person(s) or for a tonne of other reasons. It's not exactly a hard thing to do, you either type up your notes or take a picture with your phone but who really wants to write out their notes twice and what if you have drawings? Taking a picture of your notes is the perfect solution then. Well not quite, when taking a picture you just have a static picture, what about the content?
The hugely popular Evernote service has teamed up with the even more popular Moleskine Notebook company to come up with a way of combining both handwritten/drawn notes with the digital world. To do this they've created the Evernote Smart Notebook. The notebook features unique dotted ruled or dotted squared pages that allows Evernote to read the page better when taking the photo, these special dotted lines apparently help Evernote to read your handwriting better and ensure the page is not skewed when saved.
The best feature of this is the handwriting recognition which makes all of your handwritten notes searchable. This may not seem like a huge feature but trust me, it is.
The new Evernote Smart Notebooks also come with a stack of stickers that you place around the page. The idea is that Evernote picks up the smart stickers and knows which note belongs where in your Evernote account and can add tags and more to the notes depending on which sticker you use.
You also get a 3 month Evernote Premium subscription with your notebook which has a whole range of upgraded features which should make this a more than useful new service.
Although I have no doubt that this will be a useful product/service combination I'm still not convinced there will ever be a perfect solution to combining the analog and digital worlds.