First up in the Android PIM Note App Review (I've got to think of a shorter name for that): Note Everything. Sorry it took me so long; I was fooling around with saving my Palm notes in a format suitable for multiple programs, and I didn't want to review Note Everything until I'd tried out its Palm Memo import feature.

Note Everything comes in free and pro versions. It is nicely-arranged, and has lots of preferences to customize to your liking. An additional free app, NE GDocs, is available for syncing with Google.

I checked out the free version, 4.0.3a, with NE GDocs. On to the review!

• Text Entry: Very Good.

  Swype makes entering text easy, but the default text fields often have problems with long notes. Note Everything uses its own custom text field widget; it doesn't reset the text cursor every time I touch the field. In fact, it remembers the last cursor location, and starts again from there, so I can enter text at the bottom of the note with no problem.

  One minor problem is that it doesn't scroll to the cursor. If I'm at the bottom of a long note, and I tap to bring up the keyboard, the text I'm entering is covered by the keyboard itself. I have to scroll down to look at it.

  Additionally, when a new note is created, I expect the cursor to be in the title field. Note Everything gives a default title, "Note 1", and puts me in the note field, instead. Even when the "Use first line of note as title" preference is enabled, I still have to go edit "Note 1" so I have something reasonably descriptive.

• Data Synchronization: Poor.

  Synchronization is all but missing here. The NE GDocs program requires you to select each note individually, and it requires a password every time. (Some indirect sort of authorization would be better.) It doesn't check for existence ahead of time; it just makes a new copy with the same name.

  There is a command to export all the notes to the SD card, but that's not synchronization, either. At least it's an opportunity to make a backup, and it does export all the notes in the main folder and its subfolders. But the folder data is lost in the process; you can't import the files back to their original folders, and the files are named text1.txt and so forth. It's very rudimentary and very manual.

• Search Integration: Perfect!

  From your global settings, go to "Search". Make sure "Note Everything" is enabled -- I've forgotten, but I believe Note Everything took care of that at installation. Now use that nifty search button to search in the text of your note. Any results from the titles or body text of your notes are displayed under "More Results". What more could you ask for?

• Import/Export: Very Good.

  Maybe I should split this up into two categories, because Note Everything's import features are FANTASTIC. It can import a batch of files from the SD card, and from a single CSV, and from other popular notepad programs (OI Notepad and AK Notepad). The CSV capability is called either "Import from Palm memos" and "Import from Outlook notes"; in either case, you have to save your notes as a two-field CSV file beforehand. In fact, so far as I can tell, the two give identical results.

  The only problem with the Palm memo import is that the "title" of the note is stripped out of the note, regardless of the "Use First Line as Title" preference setting. The title is separated from the text, and that can make some notes confusing... particularly when the title is cut off in mid-word. Short one-line notes turn into empty notes with only a title. I have nearly 2000 notes, so manually editing the note to include the title is out of the question. I suppose I could write a program to do it, but I really don't want to do all that work, either.

  However, the import function DOES work, importing my CSV files with multiple lines, embedded quotes, and other oddities. It even created new folders for my categories, although they were always under the Main Folder.

  Unfortunately, export isn't quite so comprehensive. With the Pro version, you can supposedly make a zip backup and restore it; however, with my free version, the only export available saves all notes to individual text files, with unintuitive names and no categories, as mentioned in the Data Synchronization section. That's not going to cut it.

• Data Hierarchy: Good.

  Note Everything uses a directory hierarchy. Directories can contain notes and other directories, so it's not flat like Palm categories. You can't have a single note in multiple directories, so it's not as flexible as tags, but it is useful. It's more than the minimum required.

• Data Integration: Very Good.

  Note Everything calls this "linkification". In the preferences, you can control whether it will recognize URLs, phone numbers, "Map Addresses", e-mail addresses, and WikiWords. I've seen it notice some pretty weird number strings as map addresses, but hey -- I can turn it off if I want to. It handles everything else very well indeed.

• App Integration: Missing.

  You can't invoke Note Everything from any of the calendar apps I've tried, nor from task lists. But then, that's pretty much what I expected for any Android app. Note Everything Pro does allow you to turn your notes into lists, so it could become your to-do list. It also allows alarms for notes, so it could become your calendar (in a very rudimentary way). Still, that's not what we're looking for.

Note Everything is speedy on startup, and the interface is small and uncluttered, providing lots of space for the notes. It's also pleasing to the eye (my eye, at least). It does pretty much exactly what you'd expect... and the preferences let you adjust things when it doesn't. It also has a lot of extras, like picture notes and audio notes; I just don't care about them. It leaves an impression as a compact, well-designed program.

Overall, I rate Note Everything "fair". It's easy and fast to use, and it keeps notes. Unfortunately, its data synchronization is a big sore spot. Thanks to its import capabilities, it may be the bridge I use to get my Palm notes to my Android phone, but I don't think it'll wind up as my long-term choice for a note pad.