First off, Evernote is a note taking program built for PCs, Macs, mobile phones, and the web.  Evernote keeps all your notes synced, so that if you make a note on your PC, you can view it on your phone, and vice versa. Every note you make is uploaded to your Evernote account to the internet which allows you to login via the internet and view your notes. In addition to that, you can also snap pictures with your cell  phone and upload it to your notes.

Amongst all the cool things built into Evernote, one of the coolest is its optical character recognition (OCR) feature.  Paired with the ability to take and upload photos, the OCR feature scans the image and indexes all the text it can read.  This means that you can search your images for text.   With this ability, the possibilities are endless!

Here are some potential uses:

• Empty your wallet of business cards
• Take a quick shot of a flyer
• Take notes out of a book
• Snap a picture of what's on the blackboard
• Create a catalog of carry out menus
• Take a quick shot of what's on your monitor

Now, some of you may be a little skeptical about Evernote's accuracy.  For the most part, Evernote's OCR works very well.  All pictures below were shot with a 3.2 MP camera phone.  Evernote's OCR will work with any resolution picture, but the higher the resolution (or megapixels for the less technical), the better the accuracy.  Also, if your picture is blurry, then the OCR won't work quite as well.  OCR has gotten much better over the years, but it still is not perfect.

I was surprised at how well Evernote's OCR indexed the textbook picture even though the text was tiny and almost unreadable in some portions.  Having a high resolution camera phone (3.2MP compared to 1.3MP standard camera phones)  definetely makes OCR more accurate.  Although the software was able to recognize handwriting, don't expect it in all cases.  Evernote is extremely picky about the handwriting it can recognize.  In other words, if you have messy handwriting, don't count on Evernote being able to read it.

Evernote is free to use, but has a 40MB limit for free accounts.  40MB is enough space for lots of data, but if you need more space, they offer premium memberships for $5/month which includes 500MB of space and priority OCR.  I found that it only takes a few minutes (1-5) for my images to be scanned using a free account, which should be plenty fast for most users.

Once all is said and done, Evernote stands out as an exceptional and unique tool for note taking.  It's not the ability to synchronize notes across various computers and phones that distinguishes Evernote, rather, it is the OCR feature that makes snapping notes a breeze.  Forget about writing down what you see; all you need to do now is snap a picture!