Evernote Free, syncs to mobile but not accessible offline?

[Double 2]

I looked at the pricing options and found that "offline access" is a Premium feature, which I'm not interested in. I look over at the Free features and see that it is able to "sync" data across multiple devices... this is already confusing.

 

Wouldn't data that is already synced to mobile already be accessible offline? If not, they may have just lost me as a potential user. If I wanted to set up a widget on Android, how would this appear offline? What about online? Are widgets even available in the free version of Evernote for Android?

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

I looked at the pricing options and found that "offline access" is a Premium feature, which I'm not interested in. I look over at the Free features and see that it is able to "sync" data across multiple devices... this is already confusing.

 

Wouldn't data that is already synced to mobile already be accessible offline? If not, they may have just lost me as a potential user. If I wanted to set up a widget on Android, how would this appear offline? What about online? Are widgets even available in the free version of Evernote for Android?

http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/29001-offline-massive-confusion/

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Mobile devices for all users, free or premium, only pull down the headers for each note, then stores that in a cache. The entire note is only downloaded when it is opened. 

 

Premium users can instruct the client to download the entire contents of certain notebooks so that rather than just caching the headers, it persistently caches the entire notebook contents. 

 

This is still "syncing", as changes made in one place are rather quickly pushed to all other places, having to have a network connection or not doesn't really change whether this can be called "syncing". Take Dropbox for example. If you have the Dropbox application installed on your mobile device, the files aren't STORED on your devices (at least, not without specific user instruction). You need a persistent network connection to access, modify, and sync back your files stored in dropbox. Evernote is not really unique in this requirement. 

 

One major reason for this is that evernote databses can be quite large. Mine is several gigabytes, and that is small compared to many others. I do NOT want this whole thing taking up space on my mobile devices. I don't typically need offline access to all my notes all of the time. It just makes sense then that only those notebooks you explicitly want are downloaded in full.

 

Now, Evernote is capitalizing on this need to make the premium membership more worthwhile, and seems fairly reasonable. I know for me, it was offline access that got me into premium in the first place. When I travelled internationally I bought premium a month at a time cancelling my subscription when I returned. For me, $5 here and there for offline access wasn't a big deal. I now subscribe full time, since my needs have changed and I utilize many more of the premium features.

[jefito 5,589]

I looked at the pricing options and found that "offline access" is a Premium feature, which I'm not interested in. I look over at the Free features and see that it is able to "sync" data across multiple devices... this is already confusing.

Obviously, any communication between your mobile device and the Evernote servers require that you be online. For all users, Evernote will sync *some* information for all of your notes to your device (like note tiles and other metadata), but not all of your note contents. When you're online, and you open a note, then Evernote will sync the note contents to your device, and you can read the note. No problem. And it may keep that note content around in your local storage for some time, so that when you go offline, that note content may still be there. This is what we call "caching". So at any one time, you may have a number of notes fully cached on your device. Free users have no actual control over which notes get cached, but there's a strong presumption that notes that you've accessed recently will be available in the cache.

But when you're offline, Evernote cannot communicate with the Evernote servers, so unless a note resides in the local cache, its contents cannot be retrieved by Evernote. If that's the case, then Evernote will give you an error message. Otherwise, it will show you the cached note, and all is well.

 

Offline notebooks come with the guarantee that all of their notes that they contain will be cached in your local storage. That's a premium feature.

Wouldn't data that is already synced to mobile already be accessible offline? If not, they may have just lost me as a potential user. If I wanted to set up a widget on Android, how would this appear offline? What about online? Are widgets even available in the free version of Evernote for Android?

Widgets are different. They are available for free, and are just another way to access Evernote. The widgets are stored locally on your device, so will not disappear whn you're offline, however, some of them display Evernote content, that that would presumably be subject to the offline rules as above.

[Double 2]

Thanks for your advice guys, really appreciate it.

 

I've tried Evernote Free on Android.. it's good but it needs some work, especially Evernote Widgets. I came from using Gnotes, and have been weary to take the plunge into Evernote.. but it hasn't been too bad so far.