Evernote
Evernote is one of the more established productivity apps
for smartphones and tablets. Much like the elephant that symbolises this app,
Evernote aims to ensure you never forget an appointment, a half-remembered
message or task, or lose track of a web page containing important information.
It’s like a clipping service for you brain, and has the immense advantage of
being free to use across multiple devices.
Create an account on your PC and you’ll then be able to log
into it from any web connected device. We had problems with account creation in
an iPad; important messages stating that our account name format was invalid
didn’t appear. We used an Android tablet instead, and didn’t even need to wait
for a confirmation email.
Evernote is a doddle to use. Click the page icon to create a
new note; tap the pushin to log your current location; take a photo; and
install the optional Web Clipper widget to start collating web pages. Location
data can also be stored with your notes.
You can tag items and add them to private or selectively
sharable notebooks. For family tree, business or scholarly research, these soon
become invaluable.
Verdict
Backups to Evernote server are automatic, providing peace of
mind. This app is equally usefull to student, a mobile worker, a small business
owner and a busy mum.
Wave Accounting
Wave Accounting began as a web based financial
tool. It
caught our eye because it’s one of few such services that work with
Sterling rather than defaulting to US dollars. There’s now a free plug
in for Chrome.
Setup involves little more than creating an account and
adding items to your sales and expenses list. You can save contact details for
companies and individuals with whom you’ve dealt, automatically generate
invoices, and see a balance sheet and payment pending information. Various
taxes can be added, and payment terms amended. What we couldn’t work out was
how to add discounts for bulk purchases of materials, or shipping costs where
applicable.
You can associate your Wave account with your online bank
account, and approve or hold in abeyance particular payments depending on the
healthiness of your balance. As well as small business account, Wave maintains
a separate tab in which you can enter personal expenses. A monthly overview,
with a pie chart showing where the lion’s share of your salary is disappearing,
offers a useful visual means of understanding your outgoings.
Wave also sends you weekly updates of the transactions that
have taken place.
Verdict
few accounting tools are as straightforward and un-daunting
tools are as straightforward and un-daunting to use as Wave. The fact that it’s
free is another important plus point.
Dataviz Docs To Go
Docs To Go will be familiar to BlackBerry and some Android
users as the office suite found on smartphones. It’s the closest thing we’ve
found to a complete productivity package.
On the Android version you log into your Google Docs account
and can then view and edit items stored there or in your email. These are
listed alphabetically by default, but it’s a single click to view recently
edited files.
The spreadsheet we tried opened fine, with all the
formatting preserved. Clicking on a cell, followed by the Options menu, brought
up options for insert function, rows, auto-sum or a cell comment.
New documents can be composed, but the options are limited
and you can save existing files only in Office 2004 format.
It’s easy enough to select a specific cell to enter data in
Sheet To Go, but you need to bring up the menu list and choose an option before
the onscreen keyboard appears.
Viewing text documents is a plain vanilla experience, with
text filling the full width of the screen and displayed rather small by
default. You can pinch to zoom in, but the copy doesn’t reflow.
You can open documents stored on an SD Card. Documents are
saves either to this or Google Docs.
Verdict
Docs To Go is simple to use and covers basic tasks without
complaint, but it’s rather unsophisticated, given its price, and not without
faults.
