Penultimate, The Hand-Writing iPad App Acquired Last Year By Evernote, Is Now Free

Colleen Taylor

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch and TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked as a reporter for GigaOM, the Financial Times’ Mergermarket newswire, and the semiconductor industry newsletter Electronic News. Disclosure: Colleen holds a small amount of shares in AOL, which were awarded as part of her employment contract with TechCrunch. She personally... → Learn More

Thursday, January 31st, 2013
Comments
penultimate

Productivity technology Evernote has been hard at work lately. Alongside the dramatic update to its personal contacts app Hello (which you can read about here), today Evernote also released an updated version of Penultimate, the popular handwriting app it acquired in May 2012.

The most notable part about the new Penultimate is that the app, which previously cost 99 cents to download, is now free. That was a “non-trivial decision,” Evernote CEO Phil Libin said in an interview this week, as the app was bringing in a healthy revenue stream. But, he said, the change fits into Evernote’s larger policy of making its core products free and charging dedicated users for extras.

Evernote has also tweaked Penultimate with a host of across-the-board updates such as a new UI design, handwriting search, sharper ink on retina displays, new languages such as Russian and Chinese, and of course a deeper integration with Evernote that also syncs your Penultimate data across other devices in which you use Evernote.

The two app updates put out by Evernote today represent two “completely different philosophies” for the company, Libin said. While Hello was a full-scale app redesign for Evernote, Penultimate’s makeover was more subtle. “The design brief for the Penultimate update was to make it a little better, but don’t break something that’s already great,” he said.

You can download Penultimate for iPad here.

And here is a video of the new Penultimate in action:


Company: Penultimate

The original, easiest-to-use, and best-selling handwriting app for iPad. Penultimate gives you the fast, tactile gratification of writing on paper, with digital power and flexibility. Take notes, keep sketches, or share your next breakthrough idea – in the office, on the go, or home on the sofa.

→ Learn more
Company: Evernote
Website: evernote.com
Launch Date: 2004
Funding: $251M

Evernote allows users to capture, organize, and find information across multiple platforms. Users can take notes, clip webpages, snap photos using their mobile phones, create to-dos, and record audio. All data is synchronized with the Evernote web service and made available to clients on Windows, Mac, Web, and mobile devices. Additionally, the Evernote web service performs image recognition on all incoming notes, making printed or handwritten text found within images searchable.

→ Learn more