Review: SplashNotes – yet another outliner for iPhone

Mobile software companies with big experience in making programs for PDAs and mobile phones are nowadays entering also iPhone market but some of their products for iPhone are not as good as they were in versions for other platforms. It seems that iPhone is a big reset where many established companies struggle to get market share and where many new, until now known companies are the winners.

Here we are reviewing SplashNotes for iPhone – a commercial outliner that allows for note taking in hierarchical way. It has been developed by SplashData – a company that before iPhone has been developing software for many mobile platforms, including Palm OS, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry.

Here is how this program looks like (main screen):

When going deeper, user sees the outline (hierarchy of levels) that can be edited:

Each item in the hierarchy can have additional notes and a photo:

Photo taking works unreliably: not only photos are not visible in the orientation in which they were taken (portrait mode photos are presented as landscape photos) but also, during photo taking process from within this app, it often happens that application hangs for long time without giving any feedback to the user. During photo taking processes and during usage of SplashNotes it even happened to us that whole iPhone was hanging and needed reset:

… and that the iPhone resetted itself. Clearly this application is not yet very stable.

Synchronization with desktop computer (PC or Mac) is possible:

… and on the side of desktop computer it looks like Microsoft Office:

… but the desktop client for SplashNotes is not free (15-day trial is available only) so users have to pay additional money. Furthermore this SplashNotes client is working utterly unreliably as we took a photo (see above) and tried to transfer notes from iPhone to PC but during the process we changed also something (by mistake) on PC side and then it was impossible to recover on PC side photo a note from iPhone side.

Users can select some icons for the outlines:

… but there is no ability to send whole outline as OMPL (an industry standard for outlines) – neither on iPhone side nor on desktop computer side.

Conclusion: SplashNotes is an unreliable app with limited functionality. We are surprised that company with such big experience in mobile software is releasing such dud. We can’t recommend it at this moment because it is not only missing out on functionality (lack of export to OMPL) but also is totally unstable and often hangs the iPhone. Clearly being notable software house for other mobile platforms does not guarantee that iPhone version of given software will be also good.

If you used this app, then feel free to post your experiences below in comments to this review!