Locanote is a touch-enabled note taking app for S60 Series 5 phones like the Nokia N97. Not the kind of notes you would make in the standard text+attachment notes you can make with the built-in ActiveNotes app - LocaNote is for scribbled notes and doodles like you might make on a bit of scrap paper or jotting pad.
As the title might imply, LocaNote has a location-based twist in the tale. Each note is saved with a chunk of GPS metadata that records where and when it was last edited - that way you can associate notes with locations - pretty useful, eh? Well, lets just see how that pans out...
First things first, the note taking engine itself - this is a simple 'paint' app, roughly comparable with one of several others available for the N97. You get a pencil tool, multicoloured 'inks' line, ellipse and rectangle drawing tools and three different thicknesses of brush. Its note very comprehensive, but you are only meant to be doodling with it, not painting a Old Master so lets not get too worked up. You can easily scribble a quick sketch - although a stylus helps, unless you have thin fingers.
There are a couple of more serious niggles - there is only one level of undo, which is fine for correcting quick mistakes, but nothing more. Each stroke of a pen counts as one 'edit' in undo terms, so those who sketch with small, quick strokes had better be accurate.
Once you have finished your note, tapping the 'tick' icon will save it with a filename based on the date and time it was created. The app claims to have a powerful filtering system but this boils down to being able to display notes made within certain time parameters (e.g. anything created between two dates). Some way of editing the filename or even just adding a few text tags would have helped a lot here.
Each note is accompanied by a thumbnail, although for some reason your note is only displayed in the corner of the thumbnail image - giving the impression that you have only sketched on a tiny area of a much larger canvas. A silly bug, and one that makes a lot more squinting required than should be necessary.
Sadly, the GPS situation is even worse. Although the app claims to record GPS metadata - and there are plenty of settings and sliders to govern how this is done - in LocaNote Lite there is no way to actually use that data. The 'GPS' button which ought to launch a map showing the location of your notes just proclaims 'This feature requires LocaNote Pro!'
This seems an odd decision - charging £3 for a 'Lite' version that doesn't have even a trial example of your app's key feature? The problem is compounded when you realise that there is no way to upgrade to Pro from within the app and that the full version isn't yet available on the Ovi Store. Oh dear. As a standalone sketch app, LocaNote is adequate, but as a location-aware note taking app, it just doesn't deliver.
Details
Type: Business
Size: 0.185 MB
Price: £3.00
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