iPad becomes top handwriting tablet after Evernote acquires Penultimate
Evernote’s penmanship was sloppy, so it took some handwriting lessons from Penultimate.
Productive iPad users rejoiced Monday when Evernote, the popular cloud-based note app, acquired Cocoa Box, the creator of Penultimate, the App Store’s most popular handwriting app.
“Our team has been working on handwriting recognition and digital ink forever and it feels like for the very first time, the experience of writing on a tablet is actually great,” Evernote reported on its blog. “That’s what Penultimate has done. Now that we can add Evernote’s technology and expertise, it’s about to get a lot more powerful.”
iPad notetakers now get to use the world’s best handwriting app and sync everything with the world’s best note-syncing app. While it may have already held the title, this partnership between apps truly makes the iPad the most efficient and best tablet to take handwritten notes on.
Evernote currently supports audio and text notes, as well as speech-to-text notes, but until now, it hasn’t had an avenue to store, understand and sync handwritten notes. Pretty much any idea — no matter the form — can now always be remembered using Evernote.
While this is great news for fans of Penultimate and Evernote, let’s face it: handwriting on an iPad is really difficult. Maybe it’s just for this blogger, but I have pretty good handwriting on paper, but when I put my finger to work on a screen, legibility is questionable. Maybe I need a stylus.
Or maybe a tablet needs to become even more handwriting friendly? This acquisition may have laid down the challenge for other tablet manufacturers to think of a better tablet specifically designed for productivity, especially with handwriting notes. One of the key components of the Evernote-Penultimate acquisition was that the popular 99-cent handwriting app will now show up in the Android Market and likely on Windows 8. Wherever Evernote is, Penultimate will follow.
As a firm believer in the free market, I welcome the challenge. Who knows, maybe this is the first day of the end of yellow legal pads. We can only hope.
May 8th, 2012
I’ve used the Penultimate app on my iPad for a while, and I haven’t had any problems with my writing. There is a setting that will get rid of hand marks and just leave what your finger or stylus has written. I agree, it is still pretty difficult to write on the iPad. That is cool that Evernote and Penultimate are one now! I am going to go update that now…