Windows Phone 8 OneNote Mobile

Windows Phone 8 OneNote has now been released from the Office hub and is now its own app. With that comes some neat advantages such a quicker, more direct access to your notebooks, bypassing the need to go into Office first to find your notes.

OneNote for Windows Phone 8 is now uses a live tile to show you which note was updated last, at a glance information to help you get things done quicker.

OneNote dictate notes

This note taking app on steroids has been a firm favourite for many on Windows and Windows Phone 7. OneNote uses SkyDrive to store your central notebook, from there you simply connect to it either through Office Web apps, OneNote for Windows or of course OneNote for Windows 8. Take a note on one device, it syncs to the cloud storage and is then propagated to your other clients. It’s one of the best cloud enabled applications out there. They even have versions for Android and iOS devices if you’re that way inclined.

The latest version of the app has a few other standout features that are sure to go down well.

Send Photos to OneNote from the camera. You can now take a photo with your smartphones camera and select share and then send it directly to the OneNote.

Next up is a really cool new feature, you can now dictate a note and have it automatically transcribed into OneNote. Using voice to text technology you can save yourself some typing and let Windows Phone 8 do the work for you. Using this function is similar to how speech to text works in Windows Phone 7, hold down the start button to enable speech and say “Note” and commence dictating your notes. The feature will even work while the screen is locked if you wish it to, saving you having to unlock the phone.

Searching for one of your notes is improved in Windows Phone 8 also, allowing you to search for text within your notes. And now it simply shows you the notes in the order they were created which should take the pain out of finding what you need.

The new Rooms feature also uses OneNote so that all members of the group have synchronised notes.

Robert Brand