iOS: Simplenote's a Lifehacker favorite for doing one thing remarkably well, but if you're looking for a more feature-rich notes application, Awesome Note's got you covered.
Awesome Note looks at note-taking as more than just plain text. Your notes might have pictures, drawings, or associated to-do items. Content you add to Awesome Note also doesn't just stay on your phone but can sync to other locations easily. Evernote and Google Docs sync is built right in, but Bluetooth sync to your computer is available if you don't use either service. You can share individual notes via email or text message, too.
Syncing is very fast, but I quickly found my Evernote account cluttered up by lots of new notebooks. On the bright side, they're all marked with [aNote] so they're easy to locate, plus deleting them in Awesome Note synced the deletion to Evernote as well.
The Awesome Note interface is very beautiful but also customizable. You can change themes, choose folder colors, and icons. Each folder can be assigned its own type so you can sort your notes by different types of views (shopping, to-do, travel, etc.) plus you can view all your notes—or just a specific folder—in a nice calendar view. This is particularly useful for to-dos.
To-dos can be integrated into notes, so types can co-mingle. You can also add photos, maps, and locations to your notes.
With your finger or a capacitive stylus, you can add hand-written notes to Awesome Note as well. What's particularly handy, however, is the Quick Memo on the main page of Awesome Note. When you don't have a lot of time, you can tap Quick Memo to bring up a post-it-style note that allows typing on one side and drawing on the other. This makes taking a quick note really easy for when you're in a hurry.
Awesome note has a lot of other neat features, too, but one we'd really like to see is the option of taking voice notes—especially if they were transcribed. That would be quite an undertaking, but it would be very useful.
Awesome Note is free in its limited, Lite version, and costs $4 for its fully-featured regular version.
Awesome Note / Lite [iTunes App Store]