As (mostly) easy as 3.0 makes it to capture and share voice memos and sync notes, you really don't have an excuse for forgetting to pick up that gallon of milk.
If you don’t mind the sound of your own voice, OS 3.0’s Voice Memos feature is a welcome substitute for calling your home or work voicemail to leave yourself verbal reminders.
The audio quality is actually quite good--possibly even good enough to record audio for a podcast, though you’d surely want to invest in an external microphone. But for personal use--and recording fun stuff, like, for example, your toddler definitively declaring that Daddy is indeed her favorite parent, Voice Memos get our enthusiastic approval. Your voice memos are saved as M4A (Apple Lossless) files, which can be played back in iTunes, QuickTime, of course, and Windows Media Player, which comes in handy when you want to share audio recordings with Windows users. Sharing is a simple matter of tapping the Voice Memos list icon, selecting the memo you want to hear or share, then tapping Share. This opens an email window and attaches the file so your recipients can listen to it at their leisure.
You can use the built-in mic or your earphones' inline mic to record memos, just don't use the built-in mic when the iPhone is docked, since the 30-pin connector blocks it and your voice won't register.
The ability to send voice memos via email highlights a feature we wish Apple would add, however--the ability to do the same thing with voicemail messages. That way, busy people could take even fuller advantage of apps like QTech’s reQall (free in the App Store), which integrates info from email, IM, and text messages in a single command center for helping you stay organized and on top of personal and professional deadlines and to-dos.
Email a voice memo instantly by tapping Share from the List view.
Turning to a slightly lower-tech form of keeping track of things, the ability to sync the iPhone’s Notes app with Apple Mail is new--and we certainly like being able to access notes from our iPhone on our Mac, as well as create new notes on our Mac using its full-size keyboard (in Mail, on the left-hand pane under Reminders, select Notes). To make sure Notes syncing is set up in iTunes, connect your iPhone to your Mac, select the phone under Devices, and on the Info tab, scroll down to Notes and check “Sync notes.”
Though it's not as straightforward as it should be, you can now sync notes you create on your Mac in Mail to your iPhone.
Now here’s where the typical Apple ease- of-use flies out the window. You’d think that by checking “Sync notes,” this would indicate that you want the info synchronized in both places--your Mac and your iPhone. In a bizarre twist, however, you have to take an additional step to transfer any notes you create in Mail on your Mac to your iPhone. With the phone connected, in iTunes, select the phone under Devices. On the Info tab, scroll down to Advanced. Under “Replace information in this iPhone,” check Notes. Notice the fine print underneath, however, which informs you that this preference will apply to the next sync only. WTF? This left us scratching our heads...and sending out a little prayer to the iPhone update gods that Apple will see the error of its ways and repent with a less kludgy process for syncing notes created on your Mac to your iPhone with the next iPhone software update.
