Take notes with Google Keep

If you haven't already heard, there is a new Google app called Keep. Well, new-ish. It is around two weeks old. This is a free app that is available for Android phones and tablets, and it can also be accessed using a web browser from a computer because uses Google Drive for storage.

Keep enables you to store notes and it can cope with a several different types of content. Tap the new note button and you can either type something in using the onscreen keyboard or you can paste something copied from elsewhere, such as a web page. Paste in a URL and it becomes a live link - tapping it opens Chrome and displays the page.

The camera icon is used for taking photos using the device's camera and then storing them as notes. The microphone icon can be used to dictate notes. Keep stores the audio file, which can then be played back, but in addition to this, it converts speech into plain text too. Check lists and to-do lists can be created and there are tick boxes next to each item so you can mark when items are done.

An interesting feature of Keep is that the notes you create are synced with Google drive and you can go to drive.google.com/keep/ and access your notes on another device, such as a desktop or laptop computer. Notes can be colour coded, so it would be possible to assign colours for different categories or projects, or to indicate their importance.

Note taking apps for Android are not new of course and Evernote has been around for many years and is very popular. It is also more powerful than Google Keep too and it has more functions. However, Keep is very simple and it may be sufficient for people that don't need a lot of features.

To get Google Keep, just go to the Google Play Store on your device and enter 'keep' into the search box.