Evernote is a cool tool has the potential to become my outsourced brain, a place to store anything I want to remember, tag it, annotate it and make it easy to find when I need it.

I have been testing Evernote for about a month now. This week it is available to anyone in open Beta.

Evernote allows you to capture information in any environment using whatever device you prefer, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere. Here’s an intro to some of the features and my verdict:

Capture (almost) any kind of information

Most importantly, Evernote lets you clip and save information from web pages with a bookmarklet, called the web clipper. When you find a blog post, recipe, book review, or travel destination that you want to remember, select the most interesting information and click the clipper button.

Text, links and images are sent directly into your Evernote account so you can access it whenever you want. All your saved items are called notes and you can edit your notes, adding or removing tags or annotations.

What I really love about Evernote is that I can take snapshots with my mobile or iSight camera and save to Evernote. Evernote will recognize writing, even hand writing in the saved images. I use recently used this feature to capture street names and names of cool bars when I visited Lisbon.

On Evernote Web l can choose to make notebooks public. This is very useful for teamwork like brain storming and web research. I also imagine it’s a nice way to share resources from a meeting.

You can also emaili notes into your account or upload and search notes from your Windows mobile.

Evernote supports text, html, jpeg, gif, png, wav, mp3, and ink (Evernote format). The Evernote client applications may support other data types and convert them before synchronizing.

Sort, search, find

You can scroll through thumbnails of your notes, giving you a nice view of your saved items. This can be done in Evernote Web or in clients for Mac and Windows XP/Vista. The clients synchronize with the web account and provide an easy way to add images or mp3 files.

Once you have gathered a certain amount of notes, you might find it convenient to organize notes in notebooks. You move notes easily from one notebook to another by drag and drop.

You can search your notes and save searches for later. You can search all of your notebooks in one go, a single notebook or even a single note. Evernote will highlight your search term weather it appears in a text or an image.

There is also an option to filter notes by attribute. There are quite a few handy attributes to choose from: When is a note created or modified, does it contain images or audio, did it enter Evernote from a web page, email, mobile phone or desktop application.

Is it any good?
Evernote is a lot of fun and has potential to make the everyday lives of a lot of busy and often confused web heads a lot easier.

However, Evernote is still in Beta and there are some quirks. At the time of writing there’s a bug in tag support. There is also an entire feature — to-do items — that is so poorly documented I couldn’t find out how to use it.

That said, there’s a lot of useful documentation and the Evernote blog has updated info on releases fixes and more.

I miss a way to upload images through the web interface. I love web interfaced and a desktop application for a tool I use primarily to make web clippings seems cumbersome. And I hope support for mobiles that don’t run Windows is in the pipeline.

Take a tour of Evernote.
Read more about outsourced brains.

Video tutorial (4:39 min)