There are probably hundreds of note taking apps in the App Store and many of them offer a very simple text or rich text format. Apple's own offering is probably the most prominent, but that little yellow pad is notoriously limited -- such as the only export options are through iTunes or emailing yourself a copy.

But note taking means more these days than simply a pad on which you jot down ideas. It means handwriting on the iPad, it means accessibility no matter where you are, it means cloud access, it means integration and more. And with those things in mind, here's where we went with our search.


 

Simplenote (Free)

Simplenote is our go-to app for note taking, with writing and syncing options through iPad or iPhone versions, browser access, and multiple third party software that gets the job done. There are even dashboard widgets and extensions and add-ons for your browser.

Signing up for an account is as simple as the app's name. Email and password and you're good to go. The user interface is likewise simple as possible. In the iPhone, you have a screen where your notes are listed, and in the iPad this screen is the left hand side of the app. Tap on the + button at the top of the screen to create a new note. The first line of your note becomes the title. Above the note area is a field where you can tag your notes for organization.

At the top of the note itself are four tools indicated by icons. Here you can delete your note, send it by email, publish the note online or share the note with other Simplenote users. You can also revert to previously synced versions of the document and get character and word counts.

Simple Controls

For the most part, Simplenote is a reliable app offering the beauty of easy access. We often use it for shopping, writing a list on our desktop for iPhone viewing when we get to the store. This very review started out on the desktop, was continued on the iPad, and was spot edited throughout the day on the iPhone.

We did find that note integrity and reliability was only as good as the servers. We've lost a note or two and until a recent fix, Simplenote was adding in repeated lines to our notes. An app update claims to fix this problem but we found the same issue with our third-party desktop client, JustNotes, leading us to believe the problem was greater than a bug fix.

Believe Us, We Didn't Mistype This Much

PlainText (Free)

Very similar app to Simplenote in almost every regard is Hog Bay Software's PlainText. Instead of their own dedicated servers, Hog Bay partners with Dropbox for syncing purposes, a smart move that allows them to piggy back on the server's offerings. When you open the app, you are prompted to either link to or create an account in Dropbox. The app then creates a dedicated folder within your Dropbox folder and uploads all your notes there.

Stripped Down Interface Doesn't Get In Your Way

In most respects similar to Simplenote, PlainText's note screen is free of clutter, the only thing other than the keyboard being the editable title bar across the top and the list pane hider in the lower left on the iPad. In the list pane (or screen), simplicity also rules. Three buttons at the bottom of the list allow you to access settings, create a new folder, and create a new document. Nested folders can also be created, a trick Simplenote's tagging system lacks.

Easy Control Panel

Files are available immediately in Dropbox including its app, allowing you to move these files directly into other apps such as Pages or GoodReader. Simple text files made on your computer can also be uploaded to Dropbox and opened in PlainText. Easy, quick, and reliable seems to be the developer's motto and it works.


 

Notes Plus ($0.99)

Developer Viet Tran is having a sale as of this writing on their mixed note taking app, Notes Plus for the iPad. These type of feature rich apps use the touch screen for handwriting, offer typing options, and in many cases include sound recording. Marketed at students and business people, these loaded apps can be confusing, crammed as they are with features.

The Developer Shows Off

Luckily, we found our way around this app in a few minutes of use, though our most desired feature was not so easily found. As with many handwriting apps on the iPad, Notes Plus features a magnified area that allows for ungainly iPad handwriting to be shrunk down into manageable sized letters. This prevents your notes from consisting of five gigantic words per page. Notes Plus also includes the immensely helpful Palm Pad, a moveable neutral zone so your hand can rest comfortably without interacting with the screen.

Users have a great deal of customizability with this app, being able to change the color of the paper, to go from lined to unlined to graph paper, font colors can be changed, shapes can be drawn on the page, pen line thickness and colors can be changed and more.

Tons of Customizability

For syncing purposes, Notes Plus allows you to save the note as an image to your camera roll, to upload it through iTunes, and, as a PDF, to email your notes or upload them to Google Docs. Docs can't be imported back into the app, however. The mono-directional quality makes Notes Plus good for some things but not as simple as the text only apps. We were also not surprised to see that the audio portion of our notes didn't export to Google Docs or through iTunes, a failure on the part of the app as far as we were concerned.


 

Dragon Dictation (Free)

This was our original gee-whiz app. Just tap the red button in the center of the screen, speak into the microphone, and sit back and watch. In short order Nuance Communication's Dragon Dictation turns your gibberish into print. It was astonishing at first, the app's rate of exactness. We found ourselves speaking with extra clarity to help the app along and we realized that this particular helper served two functions. Not only would it turn our speech into print for us (helpful for when you're walking or driving and), but it would force us to improve our elocution.

A Fine Bit of Control

Both versions record for 60 seconds of dictation though you'll wish to speak slowly and clearly. When you're finished, tap the downward arrow button and you're given the option of sending your spoken piece in print to SMS, email, Facebook, Twitter, or merely copying it to the iPhone's clipboard. A settings button lets you log in to social media, and you may also select from a variety of languages the app will recognize including American and European version of Spanish as well as those types of English plus Australian.

Options

The iPad version currently offers fewer languages, only two Englishes and non Spanish whatsoever, though it saves your transcription for some time afterwards. This is a decent feature as is the built-in tutorial walk through that has shortcut cues for certain grammatical elements of your note. Such as "new line" for a new one and "period" or "full stop" to end the sentence.

WritePad ($3.99 iPhone/$9.99 iPad)

Stan Miasnikov is cooking up something with his WritePad app. Currently available in separately priced versions, WritePad takes your handwriting on the touch screen and turns it into print. Granted, this is as accurate as your handwriting is neat, though WritePad makes a great effort at getting it right.

Write, Then It Appears

The app can be a little bit confusing as it comes packed with features. The options page is fully three screens long which includes Twitter, Facebook, and Email settings, allows Dropbox sync, sets your page style, enables landscape, chooses dictionaries and so much more.

This Thing is Packed

From the main page, you can open a new note, import from your clipboard, save your note, choose handwriting recognition or keyboard entry, and set your handwriting recognition to distinguish between numbers, letters, or symbols. It's not just feature rich, this app is ten pounds of features in a five pound bag. You can even translate your notes into a variety of languages and the developer offers different versions of the app in other languages.

But the end all be all of this app is how well it turns your handwriting into text. "This sentence was written by hand" transcribed perfectly as did all ten numerals and several complex characters such as %, #, $, and &, though try as we might, we could never get an asterisk to work. It runs a little slower to turn cursive into text, and we haven't written cursive for years save for our signature, but it had little trouble recognizing those letters as sloppy as we made them.

There are possibly more features in the app than it needs, though use of its main reason for existing is fairly simple and intuitive. Our handwriting isn't any great shakes and it's only worse with just a fingertip, yet WritePad had no trouble turning nearly every single one of our letters into their exact characters. That's pretty darn handy and well worth the price.

 

Finally:

There's no good way to answer this question as a showdown winner-take-all. All four of the note taking apps we reviewed were great solutions to specific problems. If space is a premium on your iOS device, then you'll want whichever app best suits your needs. We're keeping all four on us at all times as sometimes we want a note we can read wherever we are and sometimes we want a note that recognizes our handwriting and sometimes we want to take a note and don't have our hands free. If there were any competition, it'd be between the apps which are the closest in features, PlainText and Simplenote. Use both at the same time is how we work, making multiple copies of our documents. It's a good practice to get into, never relying on one copy to be there when you need it.