I recently received a box of Moleskine products to review. I’ve been using them for a week or so.
The Moleskine Portfolio XS ($(removed)) is a small business card and receipt holder. It has two accordion folders. I suppose it could work as a little wallet, too.
This yellow planner (next to the green portfolio) goes from July 2013 to the end of 2014. Measuring 3.5″ x 5.5″, it is loaded with all sorts of reference information, and can be used vertically or horizontally. I keep my calendar on my phone and computer, but as an experiment, I started copying my schedule and travel plans to it. I found that I was able to wrap my head around my schedule more thoroughly than with my electronic calendars. I like the way you can use the book either vertically or horizontally. However, the convenience of having my notes sync between all my electronic devices means that I won’t adopt this Moleskine planner as my primary scheduler.
The Evernote Notebook is my favorite. For one reason, I like grid-ruled pages. The size good, too: 5″ x 8.25″. The notebook comes with a 3-month subscription to the pro-version of Evernote, which normally costs $(removed)/month. I’m already a yearly subscriber to Evernote, so that feature doesn’t mean anything to me. The idea of this notebook is that you can take cellphone photos of the pages and send them to Evernote. Evernote will then scan the pages and do optical character recognition on them so you can search your notes. But if you already have an Evernote account, you probably know that you don’t need a special notebook to make this happen — Evernote scans all your hand-written notes and turns it into searchable words. Like I said, the main reasons I like this notebook are 1) the grid-rule, and 2) the size.
Finally, here’s a smaller (Size 3.5″ x 5.5″) Moleskine with a Hobbit theme. My younger daughter likes it. It has a map of Wilderland in the back pocket.
