There should be a (beta) next to the Google Keep name
[UPDATE] I am sticking with Evernote, already uninstalled anything keep oriented.
Ok, so we can leave the comparison from Keep to Evernote out of the discussion for now because there is no comparison. Evernote is a mature product supporting just about every platform and feature you can think of. #Keep is but a child that has a lot to learn.
It was interesting watching notes update on my phone as I typed them into my computer. But 99.99% of the time the next sync my phone did on its own would suffice to get notes from computer to phone and back again. As far as entering notes on the phone it was quick to speak something into a note or swype a word or two, but hey, this is a note taking app if getting notes into it were hard then in would be useless. Should we all jump to Keep? or will this just be another product that ends up on the list of some 70+ products that google has created and discontinued. Oh, and just as a reminder Google Reader and iGoogle are schedule to be killed this year.
A quick look at using the app on the phone. You can enter notes, photos, text to speech, checklists easy enough. On more than one occasion I have deleted a note only to have it come back an obvious syncing problem. The design is fluid and you can change from a kind of tiled look to a list view. Notes with less text have it shown at a larger font where notes with a lot of text uses a small font. You can change the color of the notes from White to Red, orange, yellow, green, teal, blue and gray. This color scheme might be a way for some people to organize notes by color, but you cannot search or group by color. There is no organization of notes at all in the app.
One the web #GoogleKeep is located under #GoogleDrive. The interface is clean but always defaults to the list view and I have to switch back to tile view every time. That is about enough t0 make me not use it. Hyperlinks that show up as clickable links on the phone show as only text on the Web. Another why didn’t someone in QA see this moment. One note that I kept in Keep for testing was a repair tracking number that I needed to copy to a Web page. Well you can’t just select the text and copy, Keep jumps you to edit mode first and makes you select the text again.
There is no organization in Keep like folders or groups. Perhaps when it is more integrated with Google Drive you will be able to do that, but for now is just a long list of notes. You can archive notes, but the search does not seem work on the archive.
Finally, if I could scream it loud enough maybe Google will hear me. Browser Plug-in!!! A lot of note taking is capturing links and pages from the web. An a chrome plug-in would make that quick and easy. A plug-in could also pop open a window to quickly add a note or to-do task without having to navigate to the keep web page.
My Conclusion, Keep is a beta product, with beta features and problems. So what is it good for? I would say notes that you only need for a day or two, like a grocery list, or a shipping tracking number. Anything you really want to keep just put in Evernote so you can organize it, Tag it, Sort it, Search it … you get the idea, hopefully Google will eventually.
