The Good (and Bad) of Evernote for Chromebook

Posted By Mat Lee in App Picks, Features, Lifestyle, Tech

BreakingModern — Evernote for Chromebook, also known as Evernote for Android, is the latest incarnation of one of the most successful apps in history. The explosive popularity of Chromebooks in 2014 made the launch of Evernote for Chromebook an inevitability. As Evernote wrote in a post, “Whenever we see a major new platform on the horizon, we set a goal for ourselves: make sure Evernote is available on day one.”

It’s one of just seven Android-based apps that can run on your Chromebook. How is this possible? The laptop uses a nifty little extension called “App Runtime for Chrome (Beta).” Once you download an app using this extension (like Evernote, Duolingo, Vine, Overdrive or any of the other compatible apps), you’ll see the extension pop up in your extensions settings section.

This is pretty awesome. And it makes Evernote perform and behave almost identically to the desktop app, which is critical. Evernote, like Dropbox, is nearly unusable in the browser-based version. It functions well enough to search and read notes but becomes frustrating when trying to modify them.

Getting Started

To get started, you can create an account or log in to your existing one. All your notebooks will automatically sync.

The user interface is what you would expect if you were on Android, so being on a touchscreen Chromebook might be a little more enjoyable. For Chrome OS, it’s adapted the app to work with a keyboard and mouse. Evernote claims you’ll get the full desktop experience but some users have complained that the app is limited because it does not expand to full-screen mode. On those 11.6-inch Chromebooks, users quickly discover every inch of screen real estate is valuable.

Creating notes is a cinch. And these notes retain all the Evernote features, such as plain text keyed in via the keyboard, attachments, pictures, handwriting and audio recording.

The handwriting option is pretty unusable. Maybe I suck at writing on a touchpad, but the handwriting option is something I would never use. Still, it’s good to have the function available for people with touchscreen Chromebooks and pens.

So if you are considering making the leap to Chromebooks, the loss of a full version of Evernote won’t hold you back. And that might point to the bigger landscape of Chromebook’s future. If anything, Evernote for Chromebook is a proof of concept that Chromebooks are not just browsers in a box. They are and will become so much more.

For BMod, I’m Mat Lee.

All screenshots: Mat Lee

Header/Feature image: “Notes” by Kamilla Oliveira via Flickr Creative Commons