Best 30 Productive Apps for Android for 2011 (Download)

P.S.

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Notes

Diaro

Diaro is a personal diary or journal application targeted at people who want to note down their thoughts, experiences and insights on a regular basis. Unlike a lot of other applications in this list, Diaro is not built for quick note-taking. The interface makes it easy to see which days you wrote, and shows a preview of the entries for each day. You can attach any number of images to each entry, making this a good tool to also capture key moments in a day. Most importantly, all your entries are password protected.

Price: Free

Evernote

Evernote is one of the most popular universal note taking applications out there with clients for the web and most desktop and mobile platforms. With the Android application, you can create text notes or image notes with your phone’s camera. All notes are stored in the cloud and you can search, edit or delete notes from the application. Categorization options include folders and tags. The only downside is that there’s no free offline access to notes, which means you need to be connected to a data network to be able to search and access your notes (unless you have a paid Premium account).

Price: Free (Premium costs $5/month or $45/year)
Full review: Evernote

 

Springpad

Springpad is similar to Evernote in many ways, with an excellent web app, a native Chrome application and mobile apps for the iOS and Android. Unlike Evernote though, Springpad comes with free offline access to your entire notes database and some excellent features for organizing notes. The visually rich interface with its notes stacks and custom backgrounds is innovative, but can take a while to get used to for new users.

Price: Free

Extensive Notes

Think of Extensive Notes as the swiss army knife of note-taking on Android. The application is chock-full of features – some of them not even remotely related to note-taking – I keep coming across new features every time I use it. Aside from a bunch of different note types, you get to-do lists, calculators of various types, unit conversion, Google Translate, lyrics search, album art search… I could go on and on. Just check out the insanely long description in the application’s market page.

Price: Free

Catch Notes

Another one in the Web and Mobile based notes applications, Catch Notes takes a much simpler, clutter-free approach. You register for an account at catch.com and all your notes are synced online, ready for you to access anywhere. Note types include text, image, image gallery, audio and reminders. In case you would rather avoid creating a new user account on another web service, you can also use your Google account to sign in to the application and sync your notes.

Price: Free

Note Everything

Note Everything is a very simple note taking application with support for multiple types of notes and the ability to categorize them in folders. The interface resembles a physical notepad, which I do not really fancy too much because of the added clutter, but might be a selling point for some. An interesting and potentially useful feature is the ability to import Palm and Outlook memos directly into the application.

Price: Free

Epistle

Unlike some of the higher profile applications in this list, Epistle takes a different approach to syncing your notes online it uses Dropbox. All your notes are saved to your Dropbox folder and therefore synced with every device you have Dropbox installed on. In terms of features, Epistle is pretty barebones and allows for only plain text notes, which makes it super snappy and a good option for quick, no-nonsense note-taking.

Price: Free

Mobisle Notes To Do

Mobisle Notes is one of the better looking note applications on the Android Market. This one again uses the physical notepad as a visual metaphor for its design, but manages to keep it subtle enough that you can focus on the writing part. Notes are of two types plain text and to do where the latter simply adds a checkbox at the beginning of each line of text. You can easily switch between both formats by tapping a button at the bottom of the screen. Although notes are locally stored in the free version, there is a Pro version that includes Google Docs sync.

Price: Free ($1.50 for the Pro version)

Tofu Notes

At first glance, it is easy to mistake Tofu Note for an iOS application. The beautifully rendered graphics and attention to detail is not a very common trait in Android applications. At its core, Tofu Notes is a very simple note-taking application that is best suited for quick lists and snippets of information. The coming soon list boasts some interesting features that the developers have lined up, including online sync.

Price: Free

 

InkPad Notes

InkPad Notes takes the pen and paper concept a step further; as well as having notepad-style background graphics, the font mimics a real life hand-drawn feel. One interesting feature in InkPad Notes is the ability to share notes with others as a text message, e-mail, etc. This can also be used as a crude way to back up your notes by sending them to your e-mail address.

Price: Free

 

ColorNote Notepad Notes

The granddaddy of Android note-taking applications. ColorNote Notepad Notes has been around for a while and has raked up in excess of 5 million downloads to date. And not without reason. The application is full to the brim with features like color coding for notes, checklists, calendar integration, password lock and more. It also has a pretty nifty set of widgets for quick access to your notes.

Price: Free