Microsoft OneNote for iPhone 1.2 hands-on

OneNote for iPhone has in short reached the UK and marks the first time the Brits can officially use a Microsoft Office tool on an iOS device. Available for free, it even improves upon the US edition, being version 1.2.

Obviously, OneNote has been integrated into Windows Phone 7 for a during, and it'll see improvements when Mango's ready, however that news has been scant consolation for iPhone-carrying SkyDrive and Office365 users. Thankfully although, they too can now join in with the note creation fun.

The rest of us

But for the rest of us, and by that we as well mean Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, this is pretty new. It's as well, if you've only managed with Apple's pre-installed notes application until now, pretty essential.

To begin with, a Windows Live account is mandatory, as the point of OneNote is that you store your files remotely. You can at the time access and manipulate them through Office 2010 with OneNote installed on a PC or via the free web app too. As a matter of fact, as the iOS application is designed exactly for a smaller, less powerful device, you may find that it's easier and quicker to create complex notes on a computer first, and next sync them to your phone.

And that's specifically what we did in our hands-on in Microsoft's London office. Chris Adams, Office product manager in the UK, sparked up a note he'd created before which contained a map and a checklist, and we got to see, using the iPhone's own camera, how the whole shebang syncs right away across platforms, including the aforementioned web app.

Picture of a friendly volunteer

Adams used his iPhone to take a picture of a friendly volunteer and inserted it underneath a new listing in his Washington sights note. Afterwards 20 seconds or so, he at the time opened the same note in the web apps version of OneNote, which had changed to incorporate the new text and picture, and then and there the desktop version, which featured them both in the same fashion. Simple and immediate.

He as well showed us the new search functionality on the handset, which will now search throughout all of the "notebooks" and come up with individual notes, as then as group headers. And this was all performed on an iPhone 3GS, with no speed issues whatsoever.

Of course, there are other note-taking, scrapbook creation apps out there, Evernote being a particular fave of many, however not only will Microsoft's be essential for any iPhone owner who uses Office 2010 on a PC, it seems that the software giant has addressed the issues and glitches with previous builds that were reported over the pond.

We as well understand that this could just be the start of a wave of Microsoft Mobile Office applications for the iPhone and other devices.